Switching cloud providers can be difficult if you don't architect code that minimizes cost of change (especially when dealing with outside vendors and service providers) By using wrappers, or interface protocols around vendor services, you reduce cost of change by avoiding integrating external dependencies everywhere in the codebase. When you abstract them out as I/O devices inside wrappers, making changes is a lot easier than having to refactor the entire app. By using this wrapper technique, I was able to quickly switch clouds and reduce cloud costs almost 50% with a few hours of work! Architecture is about making the important decisions early, and vendor abstraction is one of those simple but important decisions that need to be made from the start for a scalable enterprise solution that can be quickly adapted and respond to change.

Fully upgraded and updated, added some interesting technologies to the website. Will be posting more about it here. So far Ive integrated GitHub Actions with my automated workflow pipeline. The key is to get important alerts when human intervention is needed. So I setup some slack channels for this. My bot posts anytime the pipeline needs attention, or something did not go through.

When you're a solo developer, every minute counts. That's why I built my personal website v2 with a CI/CD foundation that scales. My strategy: automate everything that can be automated, so I can focus on what matters. This means automated testing, automated deployments, and automated quality checks that catch issues before they reach production. The foundation: Django + Railway + GitHub Actions, providing enterprise-grade reliability without enterprise complexity. Automated testing pipelines, and deployment automation that works whether I'm deploying alone or with a team. The result: I can push code and have it live in production in under 3 minutes, with full confidence that it's been tested and validated. When I eventually scale to a team, this foundation will support them without modification.

Year full of challenges, was a good year for this website. Migrated to latest tech stacks and added some cool monitoring features. Although not a lot of time to dedicate to my website this year, I'm happy that some progress was made. Looking forwards to 2024, and launching that merch store!

Im working on a merch store. Creating it from the ground up... Stay tuned!

The concept of making music by following a formula is not new. Conceptually, one can create a simple computer program (or mathematical function) that accepts some constants as input, and produces a sequence of sounds that could be enjoyed by the human ear. Procedural music or algorithmic music is created by using math, logic, pesudo-randomness and other interesting tricks to generate beautiful compositions. I've always been interested in music, computers and math, and it's about time I start exploring the possibilities. With the recent introduction of AI, the possibilities for algorithmic music have taken a leap forwards. Will AI help us make better music, or just more of the same?

Working on updating all dependencies to latest, including React and React-dom to version 18. There are major changes, and I'm getting there, but the site will be under construction for a few days while I finish the migration.

The website has been under construction lately. Had to switch cloud providers. My last provider had some major issues, and decided to suspend free tier database services. Long story short, the site us up and running again on a new host. I'm still working on recovering all content, but it looks like I'm having to build all the content back up again from zero. Thanks for the patience and more updates soon! Sincerely, Jose L