Wanting To Be Liked
Website Ambitions
As part of the website development for this blog, it’s always been my intention to add
“Like button" functionality to blog pages and to each of the new tricks for personal and
corporate learning. Pages will also display the “page like” statistics beside
links to them. In effect, this transforms the website from being a purely static content
site to having some pages with dynamic content via server-side functionality.
Design Decisions
It took me a little while to figure out how the “page like” dynamic content might be implemented. At first, I thought of switching the hosting of the website over to nodeJS and dynamically running my existing pug scripts (from which I currently generate static HTML) to serve pages. This would take the website off AWS S3 and turn it into a fully dynamic web application. (Not sure what the performance would be like for this approach.)
I was also torn over the thought of continuing to host content via AWS S3 (and CloudFront) but with the dynamic content delivered by some client-side JavaScript calling into Lambda API functions to obtain / update page like statistics.
I opted for the latter design approach as this suits my learning curve right now. (I play with nodeJS a lot on a project I’m doing at home so I’m not missing out.)
Building an API Gateway and sample Lambda functions proved an experience. Trial and error is ok when you have the time but it didn’t work out on this occasion due to my having too little knowledge and too many technical choices with terminology I didn’t understand.
Eventually, I called upon a Udemy course I’d bought a while back on special offer which proved really informative and helpful. I was able to understand more about what I was doing and follow the steps to complete the task with a fully working example.
The Lambda functions will eventually hook up to a MySQL database (hosted on an AWS RDS free instance) where the page like statistics will be stored and updated.
Living Experiment And Learning Journey
The blog website has always been a technology playground for me. A safe place where I can be creative and try out new tools and technologies. (Thanks to Capgemini for funding my cloud accounts and experiments.)
I have a list of planned content and features that I’m working through with the goal of eventually sharing the whole website building experience at some point (including the various tools and technologies involved). There are so many detailed facets to it that make for lots of learning curves (adjacent skills). It’s already been quite a learning journey which is one of the things I love about my job.
Refactoring Required
My development approach (in terms of efficiency and productivity) has recently been under the microscope. The development of the page like functionality has exposed a few weaknesses. For a start, I need to automate a couple of aspects of my development work.
I’ve been a bit lazy with some things and left the i7 horse-power to deal with the grunt work but as the website has grown, things have slowed down for my lazy build process.
The website has now reached 33 pages and is growing steadily. Having to re-visit multiple pages, manually or via clever search-and-replace activities, has shown the “DRY” principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself) has been ignored in some places and needs to be fixed. (There’s a “bad code smell” for you.)
I haven’t used pug mixin functionality as much as I could have, although I think I’ve used pug includes effectively. Using pug mixins will help me fix some of the "DRY rot". I’m challenging myself to implement the new page like functionality yet still end up with a smaller codebase for the whole site.
Coming Soon
Like buttons and statistics will soon be visible on blog posts and the personal / corporate learning trick pages. The blog history and new tricks pages will also show page like statistics against page links too. It’s not that I want or need people to like me. It’s all a means to an end, a way of “making the day job work for me” in order to learn some valuable new technology skills.
Pet Projects
Learning by doing typically accounts for a huge 70% of our learning so “rolling your sleeves up” and getting “hands-on” is a big step in the right direction for boosting both your experience and your learning.
Having a pet project that you can keep working on progressively over a period of time will help you gain real skills, especially when things don’t quite work out and you have to debug them for yourself and when you go beyond the sample code to create something more impressive. Rome wasn’t built in a day and nor should your pet project be.
Thank you for liking this page.
Tim Simpson
9th August, 2019
#LifeAtCapgemini