Phoenix
[tl; dr] I spent some time in the recent past weeks to pull crisp back up, to the extent possible and incrementally adding back more from its older avatar. All that’s below is a brain dump of whatever has encountered over the phase.
Something a long time due has been crisp's resurrection; or what it looks to be today. The wonderful thing about a boring job, a boring persona, and any such is the element of surprise that it throws to those that never saw things coming.
The attempted super-villain-esque jot as a joke aside, it has always been a focus to build things that people don’t generally associate me with. Be it picking the mic up for a sort of impromptu singing at work, or over a few nights rebuilding some parts of crisp from memory, this has been snarky to the insider.
This time around however, things weren’t just that; the infamous untouched domain castle has not just been breached, but brought down.
Sometime a few weeks back, had a slighting remark about how I am not great at designing UIs beyond say, internal tools. Touché, surely, but there’s been a slight change in how I take it this time around. I am not just good, but better sure than the ones who commented, at building frameworks.
So, chose this time around to offload the visual part of it to someone good at it rather than battling a learning curve - UI frameworks. Instead, I chose to invest the little amount of time I could get over late night sessions, to where I fit best; the scaffolds.
For an environment that looked at my introducing Svelte as an unholy beast, my foray into Webcomponents sure would sound blasphemy; fun times, indeed. Digressing again; let me pull on. The beauty I found here is nothing short of mind blowing. We need to positivley take time out to appreciate the fact that the platform has come a long long way over the decade and some more. Interesting enough, stumbled upon this beauty from DHH just as I shipped things.
I hear a bell at the back of my head to remind me of the top of this article; the Phoenix - crisp. I have become somewhat in the recent past of what I call a trifecta. My trifecta is rather quirky; hear my weirdo brain out.
A proposal here for Deployment driven Development. Odd, I hear some of you say, but here’s what has worked for me, for what it is worth. The team has got to the point of using an automated tool for continuous development in development/UAT environments. However, the thorn still remains; how automated is it, if your configs come in last, your contracts come in last for integration tests?
Something that has had its fair resistance is this config-contract-deployment first approach to building software. Probably, I am not charismatic/convincing enough here; something to pick up for a later me to appreciate o’er a drink.
Waltzing back, a deployed configuration/contract upfront means you have all your dependencies thought out, your contracts agreed upon. But, that does come at a cost, does it not? Well, for an individual it works magic; with a team, at the mercy of the lowest available quality.
So, the first thing that this entire pipeline got was a set of bash scripts - for monitoring, auto-pushing committed changes, and deploy them on the VPS. Considering the iterations in the past with each side project, I’m surprised mild but glad at the compounding value add here.
This, before even a single line of source code was written. What did it help with? I just write code, test it, and commit it. A few minutes later, it is live in production. Works just for an indie hacker, I hear you say. But your teams can very well get there, I pray.
So yeah, as I flesh up the rest of what crisp was over the next few weeks and months, let me also share some more brain dumps as we go ahead.