The core idea of the JAMstack architecture (JavaScript, API and Markup) is to substitute dynamic webpages with pre-rendered from a template static pages that use different services exposed through Javascript API to offer dynamic features. During the last several years, the JAMstack architecture has been becoming more and more popular especially due to the proliferation of serverless paradigm. This architecture also gains its interest among bloggers who appreciate full control over their websites. Seeing the rapid development of JAMstack, several companies have started offering services for this architecture: automated builds, build previews, CDN, caching, SSL certificate provisions, hosting. Using these platforms, it is now quite easy for developer-bloggers to launch a website. To my point of view, these platforms may take a piece of a pie from traditional blogging platforms.
For the last three years, I used Netlify to host my website. I was pretty happy with the services this company provides, especially considering that they were free of charge for me. However, recently Cloudflare has also launched its JAMstack platform called Cloudflare Pages, and I decided to try it myself in order to discover its pros and cons. In this article, I compare the services provided by these companies from a blogger perspective, and share my opinion when each of them should be used.
In the article describing Tmux, as an example I have shown the script that creates an environment for writing content for my Hugo website. However, this script is not very convenient if I need to start writing a new blog post (the action that I do most often): I have to create an environment, then I must create new directory for a post, copy there a template and modify the parameters in the preamble (at least, I have to add the date and the title). Therefore, in order to facilitate this process I have developed a new script used to create an environment for writing new blog posts. In this article, I share this script and explain how it works so that you can adapt my experience in your setup.
Nowadays, it is a quite popular to store semi-structured information using JSON format. Indeed, JSON files have quite simple structure and can be easily read by human beings. JSON syntax allows one to represent complex dependencies in data and avoid data duplication. Moreover, all modern programming languages have libraries that facilitate JSON parsing and storing data into this format. Not surprisingly, JSON is extensively used to return data in Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) .
At the same time, data analysts prefer to deal with structured data represented in the form of series and dataframes. Unfortunately, transforming JSON data into structured format is not that straightforward. Previously, I preferred to develop code to parse manually complex JSON files and create a pandas dataframe from the parsed data. However, recently I have discovered a pandas function called json_normalize
that saved me some time in my projects. In this article, I explain how you can start using it in your projects.
I like to work using an adapted Pomodoro technique, therefore I added a timer widget to my desktop (I use Kubuntu as my operating system). Unfortunately, in Kubuntu by default when the timer ends, there is no sound notification about this event. Moreover, the set of predefined timer intervals does not fit my needs. In this short post, I explain how to make the timer widget more comfortable.
Today, I want to note down my thoughts on closures. Closures are important in Rust, because they are extensively used in iterator adapters paramount in development highly performant programs. However, to my point of view this topic is not well-covered in The Book. This may be a reason why it is considered among the most difficult parts of the language. In this post, I will try to shed more light on it, hopefully making it more clear to Rust learners. Note that I am still a novice to the language, and my understanding may not be fully correct.