About This Website
I have created marcinjahn.com because I needed a place to store various notes that I create while learning/working. I use many sources (books, videos, tutorials) to find valuable knowledge. Anytime I learn a new technology, I like to note down key points that I can later use to remind myself what it’s all about. The notes are not too detailed, because that’s not their purpose. The details can be found in the source material, while the notes contain the gist of it. Don’t treat it as a learning material, it’s rather a summary of what a given technology has to offer.
I find these notes to be quite useful since I tend to easily forget various concepts if I don’t use them in a week or more.
I have gone through other solutions that took me to a conclusion that I actually need a website. In the past I had used the following approaches:
- pen and paper - initially, I noted all stuff in a paper notebook. It would be perfect if only it was easy to add information in between of what I had already noted. I could use a tablet for it, but somehow I find writing or reading using a tablet to be a rather bad experience. When I really am out of ideas of what to do, I transfer these notes to a digital form (and they land on this website)
- OneNote - good for notes in general, but not great for programmer notes.
- Boost Note - I used it briefly, at the time the Free tier had some limitations regarding tagging that were a pain to live with.
- HackMD - cool markdown notebook, but the organization of pages was not ideal. I couldn’t organize notes in a way that I wanted.
Since none of the above worked for me, I have decided to build something myself. Instead of creating an actual note-taking app I realized that a simple website with markdown documents is all I need! Other than the simplicity, I also get the following:
- a developer experience - each update of my notes is a git commit.
- a personal website - as an addtional result, I’d have my own website, like all the other cool kids out there! It’s not a blog though, I’m too lazy for that.
- a small project to experiment with - building something in your free time is difficult to have motivation for if you don’t really see any use for it realistically. Building a website that I actually am going to use (I read my notes!) gives me a motivation to work on it. Together with that comes motivation to play a bit more with various technologies (like Kubernetes).
Code
This site is open-source. You can find the source code and K8s manifests on GitHub.
Technologies
Frontend
The website is built using Astro. It’s a great static site generator that turns markdown into HTML, CSS, and JS files that in the end load up in your web browser. It’s really easy to use and powerful when needed. For the needs of this website I’ve developed my own theme based on the default one provided in the package.
In the past, I relied on VuePress.
Infrastructure
Kubernetes
I use Kubernetes, or more specifically Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), to host and manage various components that the project is composed of. The nodes are automatically scaled keeping the cost as low as possible.
I used NGINX Ingress Controller to expose the website publicly.
For TLS needs, I installed cert-manager (using Helm). It has automatically set up Let’s Encrypt certificate for my site and it renews it periodically.
The website has a CI/CD workflow defined using GitHub Actions. In order to make any change, all I have to do is push a commit to the main branch of my repository.
GitHub Pages
Due to the fact that my K8s cluster is used for various experiments, it might stop working sometimes (also, I might run out of Azure credit in a given month :|). Since a website that is accessible a bit randomly is not what I wanted, I decided to host the website somewhere else as a backup. Since the page’s source code is already on GitHub I decided to go with GitHub Pages. I have a separate GitHub Actions workflow defined that automatically builds the artifacts from the main branch.
Both the AKS and the GitHub Pages IPs are configured for my domain, so when visiting https://marcinjahn.com you might get the bits from either one of these.