Migrating to GCP!!!

For the past week, I've been working on migrating my personal blog from GitHub Pages to a Google Cloud Platform project, and it's going pretty smoothly. This is a sudden change for sure, but it was the next obvious step that I had in mind.

Why the sudden move?

With a bunch of things coming closer, like my conscription date, it became obvious that I won't have access to my computer most of the time, or just a laptop with git in general. That means using GitHub to edit Markdown files and push them to my repo would be more tedious and just harder in general.

So, managing this blog in the browser has become a more viable approach.

It also didn't help that I have been dabbling with GCP and wanted to try using Go for the backend.

The stack

First, the infrastructure uses Terraform as the IAC to manage the GCP project.

Next, the frontend uses Astro.js as the framework. This was a careful decision made because of what it stands for. Unlike Next.js and other frameworks, Astro.js is content-driven. This matched well with my intentions of this blog being, well, a blog (not a web app).

And lastly, the backend uses Go. This was a first, using Go for things other than competitive programming. There were a ton of packages imported to simplify the process, but compared to Python alternatives like FastAPI or Django, using Go was pretty tricky to get right.

If you're curious, you can check the repo here.

Where do we go from here

As you might have noticed (note: it's bare-bones black and white, nothing interesting in particular) the frontend requires a bunch of revamping. To get it back to how it was before will take a while to get right as well.

Also, some of the backend parts aren't working properly. One thing I've noticed is that the tags aren't being properly saved, which is annoying me tremendously.

I'll be sure to keep this blog updated, but since I've got the basic settings in place, I can start uploading more on this blog again. Maybe I can by bringing back my previous posts.