Update 03-2023: This article was migrated from the previous version of my blog written in Java and refers to the technical
implementation of that application.
Every few years I convince myself that what’s missing from my life is a personal blog. The logic behind this decision is normally to learn a new technology or language, but my hope is that it will also act as a log of personal achievements and past endeavours. There has also been a substantial amount of research suggesting that personal blogging has multiple mental health benefits, emerging from the in-depth analysis of our experiences that leads to increased self-awareness.
So, that’s the why, onto the how. This blog has been developed using various technologies, some of which will be discussed in more detail in future posts, including:
- Spring Boot
- Spring Security
- Spring Data
- Thymeleaf
- Docker
- PostgresSQL (originally MongoDB, but switched after selecting Heroku)
- Cucumber-JVM
- Selenium
Some features implemented using these technologies are:
- Login & Admin Area
- Article & related domain CRUD (you’d hope so on a blog!)
- Basic Search
- Pagination
- Tags
- ATOM Feed
- Code Syntax Highlighting
- Automated Testing
Hosting is provided by Heroku and was determined as the best cloud platform for my needs, more light will be shed on this decision in a later post.
And to round things out, here’s a view of the backlog:
- Add database migration support e.g. flyway or liquibase
- Add more tests
- Custom error pages
- More content
- Version numbers
- Automatic changelog posts