Constant Thinking

Welcome Back!

| In General
| 2 minute read |by Constantin Gonzalez
A big, friendly, sign that says 'Hola'.

A lot has happened since I changed my job more than 5 years ago.

I learned new stuff, met a lot of customers, blogged and podcasted (though on other platforms), and I didn’t get to give this blog much care.

Until my old hoster told me that they’re discontinuing the old PHP version that this blog’s CMS ran on and that I better do something, otherwise bad things may happenTM.

Cleaning up some technical debt

We all have it: Technical debt. No time to fix, clean up or refactor because, you know, oh, look: new and shiny!

In fact, I built and re-built my own blogging platform as a static website generator years ago, written in Python with some Jinja2-Fu and Bootstrap scaffoldung, since about half a year using AWS Lambda as well as AWS Step Functions for assembly and hosted on Amazon S3, delivered to you by Amazon CloudFront. Mostly for my German Paleo blog Paleosophie.de but, you know, one day, I’ll move my old site onto this new thing …

That’t what I did over the last couple of weeks. Which was surprisingly complicated:

  • Drupal’s data structure turned out to be very distributed across many tables. But eventually I figured out how to pointer-chase posts, images, links and stuff together again.
  • I wanted to convert all posts from HTML into Markdown, which led me into multiple rabbit holes of HTML errors and the intricacies of embedding code into special tags.
  • And then there are all these details like broken links, generating 301 redirects for old URL schemes into new ones, fixing bugs in my static blog generator code and much more.

But that’s the fun, isn’t it: Hack, make mistakes, learn, fix, repeat.

So this blog is alive again, welcome back!

What’s next?

I don’t know.

If you want to learn about the tech I’m involved in, check out some recent videos on YouTube with presentations I gave, such as Running Lean Architectures: How to Optimize for Cost Efficiency, with my dear presentation buddy Markus, or The Enterprise Fast Lane: What Your Competition Doesn’t Want You to Know About Enterprise Cloud Transformation with my other presentation buddy Christian.

Or check out my guest blog posts on the AWS blog like Better Together: Amazon ECS and AWS Lambda, or Synchronizing Amazon S3 Buckets Using AWS Step Functions.

On this blog, I’ll probably start writing more personal stuff, maybe about some books I’m reading or things I learned that helped me bend reality closer to my will, or fun stuff I found in the internet, or opinions.

You know, the stuff that blogging was originally about.

What would you like me to blog about?

“Hola” picture by Jon Tyson on Unsplash, used under the free Unsplash license.