Merge pull request 'feature/writing-as-an-architect-is-hard' (#3) from feature/writing-as-an-architect-is-hard into master

Reviewed-on: #3

.vscode/settings.json

@@ -2,5 +2,11 @@
     "cSpell.words": [
         "frontmatter",
         "slsw"
+    ],
+    "grammarly.selectors": [
+        {
+            "language": "markdown",
+            "scheme": "file"
+        }
     ]
 }

content/posts/2022/writing-as-a-software-architect-is-hard/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,130 @@
+---
+title: My blog hasn't gotten an update in 5 years, here's why.
+date: "2022-10-30"
+template: "post"
+category: "blog"
+tags:
+  - "software development"
+  - "architecture"
+  - "writing"
+description: "Good software design practices and a few perfectionistic tendencies lead to almost 5 years without any writing. This post is a deep dive into a few of the struggles of the past 5 years"
+---
+
+I've been rebuilding the old "[rickvanlieshout.com](https://rickvanlieshout.com)" for over 5 years now...
+But the website isn't that big. It could be done way faster and it has been done way faster.
+The thing is, I rewrote it several times, each time with a different design and updated packages.
+
+## Changing the theme (round #1)
+
+Shortly after finishing the original website its design already felt stale.
+Sure, it had some nice colors and I really liked the mobile view (it read beautifully on a smartphone), but it still felt off.
+Nothing on the website gave me a wow effect, most of it was "ok" and some of it was not to my liking.
+I never quite put my finger on the why, but it just didn't feel right.
+
+I did put a lot of time into optimizing and designing the bits I found important, the biggest time sinks were multi-language support and print mode.
+In the end, I even ended up making a compromise on the multi-language support because I didn't want to blog in Dutch.
+One of the things I'm glad I did, however, was working on styling print mode.
+It wasn't because I expect many people to print my website or articles, it's because I expect some of them to use "read-focus" extensions or apps like pocket as I do so often myself. I also suspect the occasional pdf download, most of which I probably did myself on my resume page though.
+
+One of the biggest annoyances that I tried solving with a new theme was dark mode.
+Hell, I swung completely in the opposite direction and bought the all-dark [Hikma theme](https://themeforest.net/item/hikma-portfolio-html-template/23366729). I rebuilt the entire site in that theme, but never published. The next chapter will explain why.
+
+## Moving to Gatsby
+
+Right around the time I started thinking about uploading the new theme I also found GatsbyJS.
+Gatsby was in its infancy back then, barely out of beta and a little rough around the edges.
+Considering I like to live on the edge, software-wise anyway, I decided to go for it.
+`rickvanlieshout.com-hikma-gatsby` was born and I worked on it for a few short weeks.
+
+In the end, that also burned out because, again, the theme felt stale.
+
+## Upgrading to Gatsby 3 and back to the old theme
+
+I'd had enough! I needed to finish my website and I needed to do it quickly.
+I picked up the new Gatsby V3, my old theme, and a renewed mental vigor and started coding away.
+The first prototypes came into existence very quickly and looked fine.
+
+Alas, I burnt out on the project almost as quickly as I had started.
+One of the reasons was the theme... but there was a more serious reason this time as well.
+
+## Server-side rendering, the old theme, and a stubborn software architect
+
+During the rewrite to Gatsby V3 I encountered various SSR issues.
+The most notable of them all was not being able to save and apply the color scheme without annoying flashes on page loads.
+I chalked it up to a CSS issue and left it for what it was at first, but I simply couldn't go live like this.
+
+We just discovered my other biggest flaw. Perfectionism.
+Because I am responsible for code and product quality at my job and have also heavily emphasized that part of my contributions in any of the open-source projects I've worked on, I felt that I couldn't release something that wasn't perfect.
+And as most of you will know, you can chase perfection forever. There is always a flaw, always something to improve.
+
+In my mind, I could fix the quality issues, but I'd still be left with the theme.
+I also realized I'd end up at the same point I started... Same design, and the same missing features, just a bunch of time later.
+This wasn't working either.
+
+## Finding a new design and a new starting point
+
+One day I found myself procrastinating on a whole bunch of things by looking at fancy CSS themes.
+I hadn't really thought about it, but I'd ended up looking at new portfolios and blog designs.
+I'd found a few good candidates but didn't really make a choice yet.
+
+Was I embarking on the journey once again? Or would I give up before I started?
+Eventually, I decided to organize my thoughts and figure out why things failed before, it roughly came down to:
+
+- I can't go about and make it perfect on the first try
+  - No translations
+  - Print mode for all the important pages
+  - Dark mode can come later
+- I didn't like the design, I wanted something black and white which could be reversed for dark mode
+- I didn't like the previous efforts of using Gatsby for just the posts and not the static pages
+- I needed a starting point, no matter how "good" it was, I needed a place to start writing again.
+- I needed a new website fast because the old one was breaking down (PHP updates caused the API to break)
+
+Eventually, I stumbled upon "[lumen](https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen)". A beautiful blog project with amazing typography and a relatively modern Gatsby setup. It wasn't perfect, it missed a few bells and whistles, but it did tick off a lot of boxes.
+I decided to fork the project and try it out, adding bits and bobs of content to see how my writing style would look with the new theme.
+
+I liked it.
+
+## Not all was perfect however
+
+As with all things in life, this project would need some work. I found a few things that were lacking which I wanted to fix before releasing a new website. I was determined not to fall into the same trap as before however and structured the work better than I ever had before.
+
+### Things I changed
+
+Below you'll find a list of some of the biggest things I've changed.
+
+- I added a Dark mode with a little [react-toggle](https://github.com/aaronshaf/react-toggle) to switch between light/dark.
+- Blog posts now show a header that includes the "back to articles" button and my name.
+- Added code block theming for both light and dark mode
+!["A block of code in both the dark and light themes"](/media/prism_styles.png)
+- I added support for tables with a bit of styling around them (slight indent and row styling)
+![a table](/media/table.png)
+- I added the ability to quote others in a beautiful way
+![a quote](/media/quote.png)
+- Medium like image zooming (click any of the images above)
+
+#### The posts query bug
+
+Here and there I also encountered some bugs. Most of them got fixed in my copy but one of them was big enough that I felt a need to contribute to the project. The "posts query" bug.
+
+Before the fix, there was a bug in the `post-query` file that simply looked through all markdown files to find pages with a slug.
+This, however, is troublesome if you have more than the 3 example pages because the default page sizing will fail.
+You see, the code that fetches the blogs does so by filtering out real "posts", but the pagination queries do not.
+This meant that, given enough pages, the pagination would overflow and tell the user that there were more posts available than there were.
+If a user were to click on "next" they would be presented with an empty page.
+
+In the end, it was a tiny bug, but I [submitted a PR](https://github.com/alxshelepenok/gatsby-starter-lumen/pull/1125) to fix it in the upstream repository.
+
+## making it my own
+
+Though the original codebase gave me a great starting point I have decided not to follow the upstream contributions but instead forge my own future.
+Doing so allows me to keep my codebase clean and allows me to deviate from the choices made by Alexander.
+
+Alexander is slowly introducing more features than I need.
+One of the newer feature commits (a dark mode) even included his own state management library "diesel" for which I see absolutely no fit in the project.
+
+As such, I have decided to simply skip pulling from upstream and maintain the website myself.
+
+## The future is bright
+
+Now that I have this new blog it should be easier for me to write some articles.
+Let's hope I will find time to write more than I have in the past 5 years!

package-lock.json

@@ -19,7 +19,6 @@
         "gatsby-plugin-catch-links": "^4.24.0",
         "gatsby-plugin-feed": "^4.24.0",
         "gatsby-plugin-google-gtag": "^4.24.0",
-        "gatsby-plugin-htaccess": "^1.4.0",
         "gatsby-plugin-image": "^2.24.0",
         "gatsby-plugin-manifest": "^4.24.0",
         "gatsby-plugin-offline": "^5.24.0",
@@ -13547,44 +13546,6 @@
         "react-dom": "^16.9.0 || ^17.0.0 || ^18.0.0 || ^0.0.0"
       }
     },
-    "node_modules/gatsby-plugin-htaccess": {
-      "version": "1.4.0",
-      "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/gatsby-plugin-htaccess/-/gatsby-plugin-htaccess-1.4.0.tgz",
-      "integrity": "sha512-CaUQ3SPkV8khTk2MvY58KJAGAQFLxrlSb9ysxB+BeOgdruI2F0hWsQQI5/A94VtZsdB/5CbJcZVNmCyDJ+SJqg==",
-      "dependencies": {
-        "fs-extra": "^8.1.0",
-        "lodash": "^4.17.15"
-      }
-    },
-    "node_modules/gatsby-plugin-htaccess/node_modules/fs-extra": {
-      "version": "8.1.0",
-      "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/fs-extra/-/fs-extra-8.1.0.tgz",
-      "integrity": "sha512-yhlQgA6mnOJUKOsRUFsgJdQCvkKhcz8tlZG5HBQfReYZy46OwLcY+Zia0mtdHsOo9y/hP+CxMN0TU9QxoOtG4g==",
-      "dependencies": {
-        "graceful-fs": "^4.2.0",
-        "jsonfile": "^4.0.0",
-        "universalify": "^0.1.0"
-      },
-      "engines": {
-        "node": ">=6 <7 || >=8"
-      }
-    },
-    "node_modules/gatsby-plugin-htaccess/node_modules/jsonfile": {
-      "version": "4.0.0",
-      "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/jsonfile/-/jsonfile-4.0.0.tgz",
-      "integrity": "sha512-m6F1R3z8jjlf2imQHS2Qez5sjKWQzbuuhuJ/FKYFRZvPE3PuHcSMVZzfsLhGVOkfd20obL5SWEBew5ShlquNxg==",
-      "optionalDependencies": {
-        "graceful-fs": "^4.1.6"
-      }
-    },
-    "node_modules/gatsby-plugin-htaccess/node_modules/universalify": {
-      "version": "0.1.2",
-      "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/universalify/-/universalify-0.1.2.tgz",
-      "integrity": "sha512-rBJeI5CXAlmy1pV+617WB9J63U6XcazHHF2f2dbJix4XzpUF0RS3Zbj0FGIOCAva5P/d/GBOYaACQ1w+0azUkg==",
-      "engines": {
-        "node": ">= 4.0.0"
-      }
-    },
     "node_modules/gatsby-plugin-image": {
       "version": "2.24.0",
       "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/gatsby-plugin-image/-/gatsby-plugin-image-2.24.0.tgz",
@@ -43715,40 +43676,6 @@
         "minimatch": "^3.1.2"
       }
     },
-    "gatsby-plugin-htaccess": {
-      "version": "1.4.0",
-      "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/gatsby-plugin-htaccess/-/gatsby-plugin-htaccess-1.4.0.tgz",
-      "integrity": "sha512-CaUQ3SPkV8khTk2MvY58KJAGAQFLxrlSb9ysxB+BeOgdruI2F0hWsQQI5/A94VtZsdB/5CbJcZVNmCyDJ+SJqg==",
-      "requires": {
-        "fs-extra": "^8.1.0",
-        "lodash": "^4.17.15"
-      },
-      "dependencies": {
-        "fs-extra": {
-          "version": "8.1.0",
-          "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/fs-extra/-/fs-extra-8.1.0.tgz",
-          "integrity": "sha512-yhlQgA6mnOJUKOsRUFsgJdQCvkKhcz8tlZG5HBQfReYZy46OwLcY+Zia0mtdHsOo9y/hP+CxMN0TU9QxoOtG4g==",
-          "requires": {
-            "graceful-fs": "^4.2.0",
-            "jsonfile": "^4.0.0",
-            "universalify": "^0.1.0"
-          }
-        },
-        "jsonfile": {
-          "version": "4.0.0",
-          "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/jsonfile/-/jsonfile-4.0.0.tgz",
-          "integrity": "sha512-m6F1R3z8jjlf2imQHS2Qez5sjKWQzbuuhuJ/FKYFRZvPE3PuHcSMVZzfsLhGVOkfd20obL5SWEBew5ShlquNxg==",
-          "requires": {
-            "graceful-fs": "^4.1.6"
-          }
-        },
-        "universalify": {
-          "version": "0.1.2",
-          "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/universalify/-/universalify-0.1.2.tgz",
-          "integrity": "sha512-rBJeI5CXAlmy1pV+617WB9J63U6XcazHHF2f2dbJix4XzpUF0RS3Zbj0FGIOCAva5P/d/GBOYaACQ1w+0azUkg=="
-        }
-      }
-    },
     "gatsby-plugin-image": {
       "version": "2.24.0",
       "resolved": "https://registry.npmjs.org/gatsby-plugin-image/-/gatsby-plugin-image-2.24.0.tgz",

src/assets/scss/_variables.scss

@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ $color-gray: color.adjust(hsl(0, 0%, 13%), $lightness: 30%);
 $color-gray-border: var(--gray-border);
 $color-gray-bg: var(--gray-border);
 
-$typographic-font-family: -apple-system, "BlinkMacSystemFont", "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen-Sans", "Ubuntu", "Cantarell", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
+$typographic-font-family: -apple-system, "BlinkMacSystemFont", "Ubuntu", "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen-Sans", "Cantarell", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
 
 $typographic-root-font-size: 100;
 $typographic-base-font-size: 16px;

src/components/ThemeSwitcher/theme.scss

@@ -1,13 +1,14 @@
 .react-toggle {
   background-color: transparent;
   border: 0;
+  bottom: -5px;
   cursor: pointer;
 
   display: inline-block;
   padding: 0;
   position: relative;
 
-  -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0,0,0,0);
+  -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);
   -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent;
   touch-action: pan-x;