Every once in a while, I get into this productivity slump where I don’t write code for weeks, and it gets hard to get back into the rhythm of working again. For me, the easiest way out of it is to redesign this website. It’s low-effort (relatively), gets some creative juices flowing and has little risk of not panning out ultimately.

And I guess it kinda worked. I spent two whole days on the redesign, and am pretty pleased with the results. Documenting the major decisions I took this time around in this post.

Disclaimer: I have not worked as a sysadmin anywhere in my professional life, nor do I consider myself to be very good at it.

I’ve self-hosted a small part of my personal infrastructure (IRC bouncer, VPN server, torrent client, etc) for a while now. These services were set up over the course of a week on the tiniest DigitalOcean instance five years ago, never to be touched again for the next three years.

Two years ago, at Hackbeach 2017, Arun Singh gave a small talk on Infrastructure as code and Terraform. Around then, I had recently started frequenting /r/selfhosted, and decided to start self-hosting more of my services. Upon finally logging in into my server after three years, I couldn’t understand anything about the way it was set up. Port 443 seemed to be occupied by OpenVPN (for punching through restrictive firewalls), which proxied HTTP traffic to HAProxy which proxied it to a web server, and so on.

A follow up to my previous post, this time we look into some of the lesser known, but widely used javascript packages.

Javascript’s NPM package manager, is one of the biggest and fastest growing package manager out there. As of writing this:

• RubyGems - 145,675 (25 new packages/day)
• PyPI - 149,111 (104 new packages/day)
• Packagist - 191,577 (103 new packages/day)
• Maven Central - 244,143 (149 new packages/day)
• npm - 679,009 (508 new packages/day)

Minimalism doesn’t only apply to design, lifestyle and ownership, but also to code. Here are some of the most minimal packages in npm: