britslampe

While I am not as frequent of a blogger as I’d like to be, there are many areas of interest I am currently looking into and/or will be exploring this year (2025). I will share my wins, loses, and any lessons learned that I find.

The bottom lines for almost all of them are feasibility and proof of concept. If other people find use in them, it might extend the life of the projects, and maybe I’ll hand them off to maintainers.

This past week I attended AfroTech Conference for the first time. I honestly did not know what to expect, and I wanted to experience something new and try a bit of professional networking.

afrotech  conference 

As stated in my previous post, I have migrated this site to Hugo, making it static. I made this decision mostly due to the Wordpress management requirements on myself and unnecessary hosting costs. The old theme was technically also static, but still required Wordpress to manage on the backend, with lots of plugins.

One thing that I will discuss in detail is that I have migrated away from Hostinger. Why? I was paying for features I was not actually using, my site’s analytics showed that I was consistently consuming negligible resources on the smallest web hosting plan they offered. So, I made the decision to switch from that domain hosting type to a simple VPS (with Nginx) through Ionos.

If you have followed me as I have switched between domains and created new content, then it is no surprise that I have once again switched it up a bit. I have migrated from WordPress to Hugo.

Hugo is a “static” website generator that can also act as a server for the content. I was pleased to find that the themes available for free on the Hugo website are of good quality and are easy to install. As you can see, the site is now using the Beautiful Hugo theme. It’s just as simple as before but now hopefully easer to read and fills more of the white space my mutuals have complained about.

The next step in setting up dual boot is to copy the bootable USB created in part 1 onto the simple volume created.

Prerequisites

• Bootable USB w/Alpine Linux installed and setup
• Partition formatted as a Simple Volume

This far into the setup, the number of articles and documents I used was less than 5. On the primary Dualbooting wiki page, there is a short guide on mounting and copying the boot system from the USB to the partition but there are a few other pages I referenced.

In another effort to skirt around using an official cloud provider like AWS, GCP, or AKS I decided to create my own “remote cloud”. It has taken weeks of trial an error and purchasing USB drives to get it right enough to work.

The first part of this process is setting up a bootable USB drive with Alpine Linux, and creating a dual boot environment with a partition on a Windows machine. It is best to use Windows as the primary OS first because certain filesystem types are not recognized by Windows and could cause startup issues.

Firstly, I would not place myself on either side of the isle in the Windows vs Mac debate when it comes to Operating Systems (OS). I see them both as nice but faulty systems outside of graphic and web development. I prefer Linux, specifically Ubuntu because of the ease of maintenance, OS customization, and the large variety of supported distribution packages. If Alpine Linux provided more packages I could install using apk, Alpine’s package manager, it would rank higher than Ubuntu for me.

Golang is a high level programming language that can be used to create web applications, APIs, and simple function programs.

It is nice to build and use Go modules in the command line, but containerizing them is much more useful and scalable. What does containerizing a module consist of? Well, once the code is built or compiled it can be moved to any OS, which is a fantastic feature of Go. With a container, the application can be moved into the cloud or other remotely accessed infrastructure.

Hello! Welcome to my WordPress blog! If you have followed my work you know that this website is not permanent and is just a playground for me to learn more about different website publishing tools. Thank you for taking the time to visit and I hope to inspire you with my work.

I am active enough on social media to network and meet cool people doing amazing things, but I am actively and ironically trying to unplug. My personal projects are geared towards local deployments that won’t need internet connections outside of the initial setup, deployments, and package updates.