Friend asked me recently “Why you bought another domain” so … i had to think about it. Especially because i knew what is it for but i had no idea how to move from idea to working space.
Personal brand?
Maybe a bit I wanted to create space connected to my name. Because using nickname is so stupid when you want to send someone a link to your bio, your code, your thoughts. On the other way sometimes you do not need to use this “NameLastname” form of login because of privacy and you can prefer to have mail@wpj.name for example 😉
Also webarchive is important here – this is a new domain in a new TLD and it doesnt have 15 years of history, links, and all that stuff.
Future projects and…
And I really want to create a product. As in work I create a lot of stuff and often at night hours I’m making my private PoCs to get outside my work box (thanks Dilbert!) now I want to make some of them public. And maybe even publish sth on OTC platform.
I already have few things that could easy be prepared to “go live” but i had no way to do it proper way without this place.
First I need to do some stuff backends. I need to make everything easier to code, easier to publish, easier to maintain because maintaining software is crucial to any development process. Starting new project, doing sth and publish is much easier than making security fixes, updates functionalities, etc. Especially when you have not prepared everything much earlier.
My way
So I need to decide about platforms to use and how to interconnect them in a good way. For last two? three? years I was totally selfhosted on my dev stack. Local instances of gitea, jenkins, full local ci/cd stack with dbs and everything that i needed. It was cool and really useful when I was doing stuff only for my home.
I can easely access my gitea from home or using ssh tunnel, I can access to CICD for new build and install it. BUT I do NOT want to make it accessible from external world for everybody. So I will migrate with my stuff somewhere else. To public space.
I also want to stop maintaining most of this stack. Because if my public work goes public, also my private should go into same place but into private repositories. I don’t have enough time to spend it both to maintain my home stack and my public stack. So home server will be only a mirror for remote one. There we have to decide -> go to “public service” or buy a VPS and make it similliar to the one that i have now.
And its really easy to answer. If I want to spend time on maintaining public software I have to take this time from some other bucket. I don’t want to use time that I gives to my family, I cannot use time that belongs to my employer. So I need to use time that I have already spent on my home server, learning and coding for myself. And now its obvious that using gitlab, github, Azure DevOps or other platform is must have. Ofcourse I will need some time to prepare a proper backup/mirror solution to be sure that if big player like Microsoft would “put this down” I will still have my whole codebase locally, with all secret keys to publishers etc.
Be good
You remember “dont be evil” google statement? It was a joke. So I will joke in same manner. I will be good. But There will be no good software, no good for world, good for me and my family. 😉 Why? Because if you will inform me that “hey there is bug in your project” I will not throw everything throu window and fix it ASAP… I will maybe fix it in future but not now.
I will have to look at cloud computing costs, and not donate too much for it. I will … have to be good for myself and dont push too hard.
Next step
Make this list- Check all git hosting solutions
- can I use my domain
- yearly cost
- MFA using keys/yubi/app
- licence requirements
- easy to connect to another services
- Check CICD envs
- costs
- MFA
- licencing
- connect with all popular application stores and selected git host
- supported technologies
- Tasks organisation
- should it been connected to GIT/CICD or another platform
- should bug reports became a tasks automated way or should i move them manually? (lol)
- Application stores
- verify all popular stores and their requirements
- costs for publishing / maintaining
- Data hoarding
- GDPR compiance
- Legal statements
- Privacy statements
- Places to store data
- costs
- Ads / personalisation / Buy in app
- costs
- GDPR/legal
- Moving from “free” to “free with ads” or other business model and stage of decision for this
After making all decisions and validations I will have to create first walkthrou if all is ok with anything else, then make first simple project “hello world” to pass it throu all of that to check if it works and later i can start migration of projects. For now I have ~80 repos on my local gitea so there will be a lot of work to do to migrate it all, make it working and make it deliverable to my devices.
I am really curious about ESP32, RPi2040 and arduino repositories and building them on cloud based machines. Or maybe it will have a local agent on my home server to build it up and then some “LocalUpdaterService” on local network… We will see. It all will come as outcome from tests.
PS its funny because I schedule all these posts in WordPress for future date. So there is a chance that most of this will be already done when post goes public 🙂