I have a Google Doc containing a bunch of recipes that I have gathered up over the years. Finally (Corona cooking!) it has got a little unwieldy, so a more convenient way to browse the recipes would be really nice. Of course, there are probably a tonne of really great apps for handling that, but it was the perfect excuse to get familiar with OpenAPI 3.0…
Long story short, check out this Github repo, where I pushed the code (so far).
The last couple of days I’ve been working on some improvements to the Orbit Image Analysis software. At the moment it’s mostly technical changes to help us be able to switch to using Java 11 (and then the next LTS Java JDKs). A nice side effect of that is being able to use my favourite JDKs from AdoptOpenJDK… The code isn’t available at github just yet, but I hope to get it pushed in the next few days.
Since I didn’t manage to write blog posts regularly enough in the last few months, I forgot how to deploy the changes to my website. Luckily I documented how to do all of the steps in my previous blog posts! I guess that is the benefit of a system like Wordpress or Drupal, where the authoring is a bit more straightforward out of the box, at the cost of the simplicity of managing patches for a static site of course…
Initially I setup Google Analytics because I had used it before on a previous project, and spotted that there is a Hugo integration. But I got thinking that there must be information about how to use the information straight from CloudFront. This great article confirmed my suspicions!
Google Analytics Setting up Google Analytics with Hugo is as simple as adding your Google Analytics id to the config.yaml. I didn’t look into whether this then assumes that the theme you are using also supports this, or whether there is other magic so that it ‘just works’.
In a recent project at work I stumbled across an annoying gotcha with AWS Batch. In case you don’t know what AWS Batch is there are more details here. In short, it’s a fairly simple way to scale out workloads that happen on an irregular basis. In our case, create a Docker image with everything needed and then run Batch when you have data to analyse. At the end of the day you end up with something similar in functionality to a SGE/PBS/SLURM (insert HPC queueing system here…) HPC cluster, which in previous roles I found were often used for this type of batch job.
Hugo works! The Deploy is a really nice touch. Fixes loads of stuff that I have no clue about, at least to a reasonable first approximation (see e.g. SEO, GDPR, etc).
Git the generated source A small philosophical question around whether it makes sense to check in the public directory to my git repo. That would basically provide an archive of what was deployed at each stage. At this point I’m tempted to do this, since it ‘costs’ very little effort and I can’t see any real downsides.
AWS is such a powerful tool to get things done quickly, and often cheaply. But it’s still a lurking worry for many that costs could quickly spiral out of control. Since I’m hosting my website here I’d like to know if costs change considerably, so I can act fast to save my credit card if I need to!
This is by no means meant as a comprehensive guide on how to do this, I’m pretty certain that your AWS account manager can help with reading material for that!
In the previous blog post I talked about how I created the static pages for hosting on AWS S3. Since you’re reading this, you might be interested in how I registered the domain and got things deployed. If you want to see how I think you can do this best, read the article backwards since this is the solution that I used in the end. Read from the front of the article if you want to know how I got there!
I had a few simple criteria for the website, which is primarily for hosting blog type content. I wanted to be able to manage the source using version control, it should be able to be deployed as a static website so that I could publish it using AWS S3. Generating the static source should be easy to do using a docker container. Of course, the site should look modern and allow me to customize it fairly easily if needed.
I recently realised that I’ve been working in science/IT/computing for long enough that it’s starting to get embarrassing that I don’t have my own website. Also I’ve realised more and more that it’s just a great habit to get into writing things up. Either to encourage yourself to document stuff that you’ve done, making it easier for yourself or others to use, or to help crystalise your thinking around more complex topics.
