The 2023 revamp of allenap.me

Judging by the date (2018) of my last post it looks like nothing happened for a few years on this site. But I’ve actually done a fair bit behind the scenes.

I switched this site to an Elm SPA several years ago. There’s still plenty of Elm, but a lot more is now being done in the server – which is a custom daemon built around Axum.

I’m increasingly coming to love Rust. I’ve been plugging away at it for years, trying to get better at it, improve my understanding, become more familiar with lifetimes and all the other things that can make it difficult to learn. Tinkering with this website has played a big role in my progress; it’s a wonderful way to learn.

But, boy, is it a lot of work to build all this stuff.

Besides Axum there’s GraphQL, SQLx atop SQLite3 (inc. full-text search), backups via Litestream, HTML rendering with maud, CSS aided by missing.css, role-based access control, and many other parts, all running in a baroquely-constructed Docker container. There’s also some WASM (from Rust) in there, but it’s not presently visible; also not visible is a custom CLI for running and administering it all.

I’ve put in a lot of work in the last few weeks. The code is now over some kind of imagined threshold where it feels proper. It resembles something professional rather than a loosely connected hobby codebase. Professional – and still fun.