So, after much consideration, I’ve retired from computer repair and decided to re-launch a site to focus more on my passion: developing solutions to interesting problems. My goal is to document my forays into the unknown (to me at least) for later reflection. Maybe it’ll help someone facing similar issues.

I have a few projects lined up and I’m considering resurrecting older projects to make them more modern. I’m currently working on a service for No Man’s Sky that allows a user to determine what they can build given resources they have (or could gather). More on this in another post.

I recently completed a Discord bot for Tom Clancy’s: The Division that leverages the very nice and clean APIs at Ruben Alamina’sย site to easily search all the vendors when the reset their inventories. This too, I plan on writing up in a later post.

So, this site is running (finally) and I plan on writing up how I made it all automated, repeatable, version controlled, secured and backed up. I haven’t worked much with Docker before, but I do understand the concepts. This site runs on Docker! It’s in it’s own little container with a mounted Docker volume for plugin files. It’s also fronted by Nginxย or, more specifically, an nginx-proxy container with a Let’s Encrypt companion container letsencrypt-nginx-companionย (go ahead, check the SSL certificate) that auto-magically creates, renews, and configures any new publicly exposed containers with their own SSL certificates provided by Lets Encrypt. The site is backed by a MariaDB Docker container with a mounted data Docker volume. The website volume is read-only mounted to a WordPress Backup container that is also linked to the MariaDB container. This WordPress Backup container periodically copies and compresses the WordPress files in the mounted volume and creates a database dump of the WordPress database. These are both stored on the mounted backup volume. This backup volume also happens to be mounted to a Dropbox container and all of these backup files go straight to Dropbox! So, if this server goes kaboom! All i have to do is relaunch the containers on another host and restore the backups from Dropbox!

That’s it for the teaser. It was a fun project and I’ll definitely be diving into the details when I get back from GopherCon next week. I’m sure I’ll have some goodies from that as well (the No Man’s Sky and the Division projects are both written in Go).

I hope you enjoy the project write-ups I’ll be adding here. It’s not all programming, I’m developing a game with my son. I do plan on writing up other things as well (we have a Raspberry Pi and home automation is something I’ve dabbled in a wee bit).

What are you interested in? What projects would you like to see? I’d love to hear about them so leave a note in the comments below!

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