For the few people actually read this site there have been some major changes to the site to modernise it and reboot how I’m using it. Since starting the blog things have been pretty dormant with minimal updates every few years, this is something I’m hoping to change.

The layout of the site has been completely redesigned from scratch with a focus on using modern HTML/CSS techniques, supporting mobile browsers and making it fast. The design is still a work in progress and will continue to be tweaked to fix usability or rending issues that I’m not happy with. The general layout of the site is fairly much complete and shouldn’t change much though.

On the backend the site is now generated using Hexo (instead of Jekyll) and hosted on AWS S3 with CloudFront on top. The main reason for dropping Jekyll was to make it easier for me to develop custom site plugins without spending all my time trying to understand Ruby, so far the switch has been relatively painless with the main hurdles being reimplementing the layouts and converting plugins.

My aim for the remainder of this year (2019) is to publish at least one post a month based around projects at work (for Capsule CRM), for open source projects that I’ve contributed to (such as sbt) or random side projects.

The first posts will probably be a series on using AWS Fargate to run Jenkins nodes for continuous integration based on real-world build issues we were having at Capsule. While the ECS support in Jenkins is pretty good, there was a lot of trial and error involved to get things setup and working smoothly. Hopefully these articles will prove helpful for people trying to achieve similar goals.