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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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Plausible Analytics
Simple, open source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.
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pages-gem
A simple Ruby Gem to bootstrap dependencies for setting up and maintaining a local Jekyll environment in sync with GitHub Pages
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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I'm a big fan of RSS feeds and use them to stay up-to-date on many blogs and sites, so offering an RSS feed myself was a hard requirement for the migration. Fortunately, Ghost has an open-source, MIT-licensed implementation of creating an RSS xml file that I could look at to ensure that my implementation does not break anything for people who might already be following via RSS. The actual code turned out to be quite simple, but it took me some time to understand, which elements where needed and why. This way, I also learned about the tag.
I'm a big fan of RSS feeds and use them to stay up-to-date on many blogs and sites, so offering an RSS feed myself was a hard requirement for the migration. Fortunately, Ghost has an open-source, MIT-licensed implementation of creating an RSS xml file that I could look at to ensure that my implementation does not break anything for people who might already be following via RSS. The actual code turned out to be quite simple, but it took me some time to understand, which elements where needed and why. This way, I also learned about the tag.
When I decided to rewrite my blog, one of the reasons was that I wanted to learn more about NextJS. It had already gotten some traction then, and seemed like a good fit for a blog. It was a bit overkill compared to other solutions like Gatsby, but I liked the idea of learning something that would allow me to quickly create even more complicated prototypes thanks to API routes.
At this point, I looked into some existing analytics solutions like Google Analytics and Plausible, but they either collected unnecessary information, or were costing money. I could have self-hosted some of them, but given the little traffic I had so far, all of these options would have been significantly more expensive than what I went with now: Writing my own little serverless analytics tool. The main reason for this was to learn more about DynamoDB, though.
When I first started, I tried hosting the blog on GitHub Pages. Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to make this work with a custom domain that was not hosted on a subdomain, as GitHub Pages requires the use of a CNAME record, and these can't be set on a root domain like startup-cto.net. I could have decided for a subdomain like www.startup-cto.net, but this would have required an additional redirect or rewrite solution, or put me in danger of losing all my existing SEO juice for startup-cto.net. I had anyway thought about trying out AWS Amplify at that point, so that's what I did.
When I decided to rewrite my blog, one of the reasons was that I wanted to learn more about NextJS. It had already gotten some traction then, and seemed like a good fit for a blog. It was a bit overkill compared to other solutions like Gatsby, but I liked the idea of learning something that would allow me to quickly create even more complicated prototypes thanks to API routes.
All the infrastructure is defined via AWS CDK, a library on top of CloudFormation. The code is now in its own project.
All the infrastructure is defined via AWS CDK, a library on top of CloudFormation. The code is now in its own project.