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terraform
Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
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webpack
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows for loading parts of the application on demand. Through "loaders", modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.
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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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react-query
Discontinued 🤖 Powerful asynchronous state management, server-state utilities and data fetching for TS/JS, React, Solid, Svelte and Vue. [Moved to: https://github.com/TanStack/query]
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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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Infrastructure (in other words, my hosting architecture) is defined entirely in code using a combination of Azure Resource Manager templates and PowerShell scripts. Terraform is the standard in the industry, but ARM templates are more than sufficient for my simple use case. Using ARM templates, I’m able to define a single file that deploys my entire architecture idempotently, in parallel.
This one solution produces multiple web applications, console applications and client (JavaScript) applications when built – including the marketing site and main web application. A cold build takes almost 5 minutes on my laptop (although most of that time is spent in Webpack). Despite this, it’s still a positive ROIT for one reason: most of this code existed before I pivoted to Assetbots. I got a huge head start by not having to develop (or learn!) a database layer, auth layer, permissions system, common app services, build and deployment systems, and more. And despite how slow a cold build is, I rarely have to perform one.
Make my deployment cheaper by using multiple hosting options for multiple needs – for example Vercel for the marketing site, a container for the MVC bits, and deno for the API endpoints.
I use tailwindcss with a light sprinkling of Material Design as a starting point for design and layout. I do not have a designer, so it is essential that I can make attractive, usable interfaces easily.
State that is synced with the server is handled using a combination of React Query and Replicache. I’ll be doing a writeup about my Replicache architecture in a future post.
On the client, Assetbots is written in TypeScript using React. Like the server, the client is a monorepo using Yarn workspaces and contains the code for all of the web applications produced by the Visual Studio solution, as well as some additional services like MJML email templating.
While I use a ton of third-party libraries, a lot of the client is hand-rolled. I think Next.js and create-react-app are great, but this code has been adapted across multiple projects of mine and is therefore faster for me to ship with.
On the client, Assetbots is written in TypeScript using React. Like the server, the client is a monorepo using Yarn workspaces and contains the code for all of the web applications produced by the Visual Studio solution, as well as some additional services like MJML email templating.
When I need to deploy an infrastructure change (for example, I recently upgraded my Node.js version from 14.16.0 to 16.9.1), I update the relevant Template.json file, commit the change, and push to develop. Within a second or so, I can navigate to my GitHub Actions panel, choose the workflow for the environment I want to deploy to, and click Run Workflow.
Make my builds faster by forcing myself onto esbuild from the beginning, even if that makes delivering some capabilities harder (like web workers and service workers, Hot Module Replacement, and so on).
Make development faster by sharing more code between client and server – for example, running my API endpoints on a platform like deno.
While I use a ton of third-party libraries, a lot of the client is hand-rolled. I think Next.js and create-react-app are great, but this code has been adapted across multiple projects of mine and is therefore faster for me to ship with.