The Seasonal Blog Redux

It's that time of year again! The weeds are growing, the air is thick and stagnant, and I just deployed another refactoring of my blog. "Why does he keep working on his blog," you're thinking, "when I could do all of that with a static-site generator like Jekyll?" Writing my own blogging engine has been one of the best decisions I've made. Having a side project that I actually use and get value from is a great place to implement my own ideas, or try out new libraries. Every now and then it's fun to throw it back in the furnance, get it hot, and start shaping it with new ideas. A blog is a great litmus test for new libraries (remember, I have an admin site behind this). You have to deal with routing, forms, interfacing with things like the CodeMirror editor, server-side rendering, async data fetching, and more. I feel like it really hits most of the pain-points of big client-side apps, even if it's a relatively small project. The only thing it doesn't stress is a complex shape of data: the data I get back from the server is pretty simple, and and more complex apps would need something better to handle complex data. But even then, contrasting my simple code with more complex solutions makes it really clear why they are solved that way. Take GraphQL for example; I definitely don't need it, but there are a few places in my code that would obviously be way more complex if my data was more complex, and it's clear what GraphQL is trying to solve. Last time I completely rewrote my blog, I learned about react-router, Webpack (with babel integration), server-side rendering (universal apps), Docker, and various aspects of React. This time, I learned about Redux, immutable-js, and having a fully snapshot-able app state.