My son Calvin is about 6 years old now, and ever since he’s born we’ve had a messaging group between the whole family where we post updates and pictures, and I’ve been archiving that to a website that isn’t public for obvious reasons. Anyway, we’ve got a couple thousand images in there, and the thread is 6 years old, so finding stuff is becoming a pain. I could search on the messages in the thread pretty easily, but I wanted some way to search images as well.

I’ve been wanting to retire the Wordpress site I threw up 4 years ago when I went independent pretty much from the moment I published it. About a year and a half ago I finally got serious and started working on a replacement using Eleventy, but I’m just not enough of a CSS guru to make something look great from scratch. This Christmas break I decided to give it another go and took a look at Hugo, which I had originally dismissed because I wanted something javascripty, but then I started using it and got from 0 to a pretty nice site in just a day or two.

A big downside of current “Serverless” architectures is, well, you don’t have a server! Because of this, some things that we take for granted in web applications today are hard to do in a Serverless model - take real time notifications for example. Usually you’d use SignalR, Socket.IO, or some other framework to help you set up and use websocket connections, but those frameworks require a long-lived connection to a server.

I’ve been geeking out quite a bit over Functions as a Service and the Serverless Framework for the past year or so. I wrote the backend for Play Your Damn Turn using it, and I think it’s great for startup scenarios - you can write something and get it out there without having to worry about the costs of hosting, and if it suddenly becomes popular it’s already built to scale.