Introduction Call me needy, call me entitled, call me self-centered or vein, but I can’t stand when I follow someone on Instagram and they don’t follow me back. It’s even worse when someone follows me, I follow them back, and then they unfollow me hoping I don’t notice. WELL BEST BELIEVE I SEE YOU WEIRDOS. So today we’re going to do some light investigation into Instagram’s API to figure out who doesn’t follow me back.
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Major code restructure lmao.
Soooo recently I decided to containerize this site with Docker. jadenarceneaux.com, api.jadenarceneaux.com, and my reverse proxy are now all stored in a single repository. This makes it so much easier to deploy new instances of my website. All I have to do is clone the repo, create the .env file based on the .env.example file, and run docker compose up -d to bring it up.
Also, a change worth noting is my switch from Nginx to Caddy for reverse proxy and file hosting. Honestly, I really liked Nginx but trying to get SSL cert generation to work was a huge pain. Certbot has its own Docker Image, and Nginx does too. The issue I’d run into is that Nginx would consume ports 80 and 443. Certbot would try to host some files for their Certificate Authority to verify my website and it couldn’t because those ports were already in use. I’m sure there’s a workaround, but I switched to Caddy because in addition to hosting my static file and acting as a reverse proxy for my web server, it also automatically handles SSL cert generation. It is literally the best thing ever.
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Introduction By far, the worst part of my job is setting up new workstations for new developers. There’s the easy stuff, like installing Linux and getting all their tools and IDEs set up. But then comes the challenge of getting a development web server up and running. It would usually take damn near the entire programming team putting our noggins together to try to get Apache up and running with the PHP-fpm on a new developers machine. I think this was largely caused by the fact that not a single one of us had any functional idea as to what the hell Apache was actually doing. Our main strat was just copying the config files from our existing machines and then spending the entire day figuring out why that didn’t work. Recently, in an effort to change the hosting of my blog, I had to set up reverse proxying through NGINX. Lowkey, I was dreading it the whole time, but it literally took me like 2 minutes to figure out. I think for the first time in my life, I actually know why NGINX and Apache exist, and I hope to share my insights so you guys can understand it too.
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The biggest update yet.
TL;DR
Switched hosting from GitHub Pages to KnownHost VPS Switch from Google Analytics to Cloudflare Analytics New API for handling contact form submissions Captcha and rate limiter for preventing bots and spam First of all, I’ve made a massive change in hosting providers for this website. Previously it was hosted using GitHub pages. A free service offered by GitHub to host static sites. I used a GitHub action to compile my Hugo project into HTML on every push. Handling form submissions was a little awkward, I had to use a third-party form handling API, Formspree. It also made it awkward to debug issues.
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Although I’m a little late, this website is now 1 year old. This also happens to be the 500th commit. I’m super proud of how far it’s come. In the past year I had over 400 readers entertain my madness. Huge thanks to everyone who supported this little side project.
Much love to everyone <3
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Let’s get straight to it. Most of this tech isn’t “new” it’s just new to me and maybe new to many of you.
My Priorities Cross-platform support I have an iPhone, a de-googled Android phone, a MacBook that I take everywhere, a Windows PC for gaming, and a Linux Desktop that I work on. Everything I use needs to Privacy I really do care about my data privacy. If my data doesn’t have to be out there then it shouldn’t. So open-sourced and end-to-end encryption are the name of the game. Massgrave I don’t know why everyone doesn’t use this tool. It lets you activate your installation of Windows completely for free and change your Windows version at a whim (Pro, Home, etc). All with one command in the Command Prompt. I haven’t paid for a Windows key in years (I am definitely lying and I totally 1000% pay for Windows). It’s literally the best
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This is just a compilation of my observations in my day-to-day life asking people about AI. I could very well just be hanging out with haters and not even know it. I should also probably say that of course I’m biased because I’m a programmer and also I love my job.
Generally speaking, only two groups of people are really excited about the current renaissance in artificial intelligence research: students who use it to “study” and tech enthusiasts who see money to be made. But every working-class person outside of the tech sphere I’ve talked to seems to have the same apathetic and sometimes pessimistic reaction to AI.
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For those of you who don’t know, I drive a 2024 Tesla Model 3 affectionately named Teezo that I’ve owned for about five months. Aside from a few bumps in the road, it has been an absolute joy to own. A full account of what it’s like to own the car is on the way so look out for that blog post in the future. But today I want to focus on one particularly harsh “bump in the road” that I encountered hours ago.
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