Redesigning hluska.ca
I'm not a very good designer so I always find redesigning my website difficult, but this time around, I've noticed how incredibly complicated the modern stack is...even if you just want to design your own website.
Get hot reload working with Angular/React in Docker
Setting up local environments is a pain that Docker solves effortlessly, but many of the React or Angular containers you find online don't function properly - for example, hot reload doesn't function in many of the options out there. This combination of Dockerfile and docker-compose.yaml has things like hot reload enabled and are great for local development.
Documentation Driven Development
Writing user facing documentation is one of my skills and favourite ways to learn about my products. It's a chance to flip my perspective from looking for the good to hunting the really hairy parts. What if we slowed down on test driven development and focused more on documentation driven development?
Final results from my site improvement program
After a very busy week, I ran another SiteImp report and checked my progress. Results were fairly good though I have reached a point where my optimizations have started to cause improvements in some areas and regressions in others. I'll conclude my series on optimizing hluska.ca.
A better apache .conf pattern to serve Django applications with Apache and mod_wsgi
This apache conf pattern will help you avoid dreaded name duplicates previous WSGI daemon definition errors when you try to serve Django apps with Apache and mod_wsgi.
Writing a Hugo shortcode to optimize my images with UI Kit
UI Kit has some very handy site performance features. Applying the .uk-img attribute to <img> attributes is one of the handiest but I couldn't get existing Hugo shortcodes to work properly so I wrote my own.
Minifying my site with Hugo on DigitalOcean App Platform
Minifying html is sort of a habit and so I decided to cover minifying Hugo sites deployed through DigitalOcean's App Platform.
Looking at my contact page and rethinking Font Awesome
I ran a second SiteImp audit and discovered that while my overall site was better, my contact page was still dragging down overall performance. It's time to decide whether Font Awesome is worth it.
Checking in on these changes
I ran a second SiteImp audit to check out what sort of performance impact working on my critical resource path created. My results were good at the beginning, but the simple changes made a big difference.
Using rel=preload to speed up render blocking resources on hluska.ca
When I ran a Siteimp audit on hluska.ca, I found that 100% of my pages (both desktop and mobile) had performance problems because I had too many resources that blocked my page from rendering while they were being downloaded. I'm going to start fixing that error in this article.