Debazeling the blog
As of this post’s publishing, the most recent post on the livestream reads:
Recently I’ve been on the “I should write a blog post” to “spend 2 hours updating dependencies across 4 language ecosystems in my blog’s Bazel monorepo” pipeline. I should still write that blog post though #hypstatic #bazel
In early 2022, I converted this site’s build system from its previous iteration, a hand-spun and ad hoc static site generator written in JavaScript which compiled in multiple passes, to Bazel to learn how to be productive with the build system since it was a significant chunk of my org’s focus at Brex.
Right before I tore it down, the git repo this blog lives in was more than 25% Starlark!!! I certainly did not do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
History
hyperbo.la’s past is littered with different builds of the site. From oldest to newest:
| Rendering | Database | Infra | Failure |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | MySQL | httpd, mod_php, dyndns.org | Hacked |
| Django, handspun CSS | SQLite | httpd, mod_python, dyndns.org | rm -rf’d the DB |
| Django, Bootstrap | MySQL | A single linode, httpd, mod_python, mod_wsgi, nginx, gunicorn, ad hoc shell scripts | boredom, desire to automate |
| Django, Bootstrap | Aurora MySQL and clustered Elasticache, then multi-AZ MySQL RDS with DB-backed caching | ALB, S3, Terraform, Packer, Ansible, spot instances | high cost |
| Webpack-driven SSG, Bootstrap | YAML and markdown | GitHub Pages, GitHub Actions | page count started crashing Webpack |
| Custom JS SSG, Bootstrap | YAML and markdown | GitHub Pages, GitHub Actions | dependency hell |
| A largely golang dev server and SSG compiler, Bootstrap via rules_sass and a custom BUILD.bazel for the Bootstrap repo | YAML and markdown | Bazel, GitHub Pages, GitHub Actions | Bazel ecosystem moves too quickly, things were constantly breaking and I needed to keep on top of rules upgrades |
| Vite, Tailwind CSS | YAML and Markdown | GitHub Pages, GitHub Actions | TBD |
Why this version is good
Well for one all of the code here is only there to support rendering HTML and there is very little of that code.
Using modern frontend technologies made switching to Tailwind CSS a couple of hours of work vs. what would have been days. It feels nice to have modern typography, a comfier layout, and to support light/dark mode and also maintain the core app shell and branding.
This is what the blog index page looked like before cutting over to Tailwind, which is essentially the way the site looked for 10 years:
And after the cutover:
Why is this new version bad
I still don’t write. Prior to authoring this post, the last updates on both the blog and the livestream were 2 years before debazeling.