mikevdv.devBlogPosts by MichaelPage 2

Blog - Articles by Michael

  • Posted by Michael 3 min read 0 likes 0 comments

    So, what makes this so interesting? There's already been hundreds of twitter competitors that have come and gone in the months since Musk took over the blue bird app. Frankly, it's the scale of adoption. I was personally hoping that Blue Sky would take over but unfortunately they have seemingly seen the same issue as Club House (if anyone even remembers them) - namely that by limiting signups with invitations, they have allowed other platforms like Threads to swoop in and take the audience share first. Threads allowed anyone with an instagram account to sign up quickly and almost out of the blue (pardon the pun), which I think has clearly had an impact on how quick adoption has been.

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  • Posted by Michael 2 min read 0 likes 0 comments

    Those who have been following me for a while might know that while I'm no game developer, much like 90% of all other web devs, game development was my starting goal for getting into programming. Heck, I even went to a game development specialist school for my college education (Age 16-18 to avoid American confusion). Obviously, in hindsight, that wasn't the plan the world had for me...

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  • Posted by Michael 2 min read 0 likes 0 comments

    The general advice is that a computer should last between 2 and 4 years. I've had the same computer for my home use since 2015. When I got it, it was worth more than I had ever even seen in a bank account. At the time I got it, it was a pretty amazing computer and I've never taken it for granted as a huge point of privilege to have had a machine like that for such a long time early on. It's been a mainstay through every professional role I've ever had. Work computers have been replaced by my employers more often than even my phone but this laptop has soldiered on.

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  • Posted by Michael 3 min read 1 like 0 comments

    People who've been following me for a while will know that a key feature of my site has always been the dynamically generated CV button on the homepage. It's made it through multiple itterations and I'd like to think I've gotten pretty good at building that sort of thing. Something I've been asked for years however, is if I'd be willing to licence that to others so that they can have a dynamic CV on their own site.

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  • Posted by Michael 7 min read 4 likes 1 comment

    I could also have called this article "How to Speed Up Rust Compilation on Google Cloud Build" but that wasn't as fun. The setup for this article is quite straight forward. As apposed to previous projects of mine, I've been diving much deeper into Google Cloud Build recently. I've been building a collection of Rust Micro-Services that will be running on Cloud Run and as such I've been dealing with incredibly slow build times with some regularity. Rust notoriously concedes to extremely slow compilation time so as to achieve efficiency and safety at run time. As such, I've taken steps to decrease the build time as much as possible - because sitting there waiting for a build is not how I like to spend my evenings.

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  • Posted by Michael 1 min read 1 like 1 comment

    I've done a few blog posts about features that rely on Twitter built into this site, from Custom Twitter Embeds to WebMentions. Given the recent news of Twitter's API becoming paid (and from what I've seen it's not cheap), I'm likely going to have to rework this functionality in the near future. It's not a good situation for Twitter. It was always a favourite of developers due to the ease by which we could build on top of Twitter or into it and it seems that's now coming to an end.

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  • Posted by Michael 3 min read 0 likes 0 comments

    Javascript and its derivatives are immensely flexible. I've used some variation of Javascript for pretty much every use case you can think of - desktop applications, mobile apps, APIs and entire backend processing systems. You can train a complete newbie on the basics incredibly quickly, and I love working with it. I've primarily been a Javascript developer my entire career and I started using typescript when I joined Pretty Little Thing back in 2020. I've been a big fan of the support that having a typed version of Javascript offers and you'll find almost all my blog posts use typescript in some capacity. Be that as it may, currently I find myself spending my weekends learning Rust.

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  • Posted by Michael 7 min read 1 like 0 comments

    I've long since wanted to add a mailing list to the blog as a way that people could directly show interest in what was being posted. I did however have the big provision that I didn't want to manually be creating emails to send out. I wanted to automate it. Off the back of my recent release process improvement I realised that I could finally start to build this feature.

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  • Posted by Michael 20 min read 9 likes 3 comments

    One of the earliest articles I ever wrote was about the posting process that my blog posts followed. It used a local typescript script that accessed the mongoDB database and added/updated a blog post. It was simple and good enough for the features that the site had at that point. I've been using and expanding that posting process for a while now, but I find myself at a crossroads... OG Images are being generated and stored the first time they are accessed (which takes a while), My local machine is taking a good 20 or so seconds to run all the local release steps, and I find myself wanting to add new features such as a mailing list to announce new posts. I need to start running this on a server so that I can start running these steps in parallel. That does mean, however, that I'm going to have to rebuild the posting process from the ground up.

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  • Posted by Michael 4 min read 2 likes 0 comments

    I write every one of my blog posts in Markdown. Markdown is easy to store, easy to edit and above all easy to implement. I, specifically, use a variation of Github Flavored Markdown with a few of my own additions that make my workflow easier - for example, I can use [tweet tweetIdHere] to embed a tweet in one of my posts. Github Flavored Markdown (GFM) is the most common Markdown Spec to see implemented around the internet, likely due to the fact it was developed by Github and is therfore open source. That being said, there are many features of GFM that I think more people should be using but aren't. You could say that I read the spec so that you don't have to.

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