Every once and awhile I like to checkout current web technologies. It reminds me of installing different linux distros when I was a kid and seeing how they worked. Except now the cast off PC that I could mess with is the cloud. A few years ago I jumped onto the AWS free tier and booted up EC2 and S3 instances. About a year ago I learned about Docker and was playing around with Django on Heroku. A friend of mine mentioned that he was learning Rust and that sent me down a rabbit hole checking out what frameworks were hot and what the state of containerization was.
I've been trying to stay busy with some online courses on edx.org, code academy and node school. I also found bitnami through openedx which is interesting because you can browse all of the web applications that they support. I guess bitnami is kind of like Heroku but for established applications instead of development?
I looked at Heroku again but it seems like the consensus is that a Digital Ocean VPS and something like dokku or just plain Docker is the more cost effective way to work on hobby projects. I installed images for both Docker and dokku and played around. Each of these was pretty straight forward and I was able to startup applications quickly. I was also exploring more lightweight alternatives to this blog which lead me to ghost which I played around with but ultimately I think I decided to stick with wp.com for the momment. That way the place I write I less affected by the thrashing around with different installations based on whatever I am interested in at the moment.
This page from tutorialzine is nice overview of the different web dev stuff that is exciting this year. If it's on that page I've at least looked at it if not installed it and tried some examples. I think I'll be continuing to beef up my Python and JavaScript chops and I'd like to get more familiar node.js. For now if I need to make a page for something I've been using bootstrap and hacking together jQuery libraries. I need to find some more ideas for server side projects so I can really put containers to use.
Anyway I wanted to jot all this down to trick myself into thinking that the last few days of obsessing over this stuff is constructive.