So it begins...
Long story short, this blog idea came from my lovely fiancée — she used to have lots of diaries, which were a great source of reflection, memories, and idea storage. So, I decided to try something similar for myself in the hope of building a habit of organizing my thoughts, finishing what I start, collecting experiences, and pushing ideas forward. Well, that’s quite a list!
Note: NO usage of chatGPT or any other ML is allowed here
The Blog
Since, I know a bit of programming, it was a pretty straightforward process of building a blog. From the first look. My plan consisted of 3 stages: implement the app, host it somewhere, buy some fancy dns name and map on the host.
App
Django was a perfect choice (my friend Mikita would doubt that), python framework, detailed documentation, huge fan base and plenty of guides in the web. From the first thought, implementation supposed to be a challenge, but it didn’t take too much time.
The only issue occurred - Google authenticator. Basically, you need to install plugin for django, set up a few urls in the admin panel, set up the same urls in the Cloud Google Console, take token from the console and put it back into admin. Thanks to the detailed step by step instruction from some indian genius, not so many have been found.
It’s a bummer, I’ve lost the link to his youtube channel. Nevertheless, I was optimistic, stored everything in some local sqlite database, grass was green beneath the blue sky.
By the way, thanks to herman@bearblog.dev for inspiration, simplicity and open repo. GitHub reference.
Host it somewhere
First idea was to try out aws, everybody is aware they provide some free cloud VMs. Don’t have any particular reason, I don’t like amazon.
So, there is an office building with a huge Oracle banner I see every working day while commuting. Honorable company, also provides free tire VMs, gave it a shot.
Right from the box you can create one VM with 1CPU; 1Gb Ram; 50Gb storage, not much but suited my purpose. More over, there is an option to create a standalone database with regular backups!
Sold!
I started setting up my project for OracleDB. After several (>20) connection attempts to this cloud db, it finally answered. Problem was in the firewall on the oracle side, well actually my lack of knowledge was a problem, firewall adjustment solved it.
Next issue occurred, I wasn’t able to build docker image for my app - OutOfMemory error. Turned out, 1Gb was not enough, so here started my long torture of obtaining another free type VM from Oracle.
Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce Ampere.
You can create arm instance for FREE up to 6CPU; 24Gb Ram; 50Gb storage according to the docs and pricing table, but you actually can’t….without paid account. Now you know!
I spent 2 weeks running cron jobs in order to start such instance, received the only message every time - Out of capacity...
Though, next second I got confirmation of paid account, 100$ was taken and reverted to my card, magic happened - The Instance has started.
For the whole deployment journey thanks to the best guide I’ve manage to find!
Fancy Name
This part shouldn’t be covered at all, I’ve bought for around 12$ per year this hostname from google.
The name came from my previous job, every employee was supposed to have some unique nickname in the system, yahelm was mine.
Extras
Oh, I haven’t figured out any catching end phrase yet. So see you in the next one!