Welcome to salvicode

Introduction

My name is Sergei. I am a software developer.

I've spent bunch of days and hours thinking of the point where I should start my personal blog from. All the other references I've got inspiration from by the time I was visiting them were already filled with a lot of articles, ads and seemed to me like something usual, fulfilled and complete. But when it comes to your personal first article ever it becomes really challenging. Finally, I made a choice to publish something like Welcoming Stuff. I'll break down the idea of the creation, the general technical part of the blog and will share some plans for this blog. Let's begin. Welcome to salvicode.com!

Idea

The idea of creating my personal blog has been chasing me for about 10 years(Yes, some things in my life stay postponed for quite a lot). I even tried to publish something like a blog at the beginning of my career in the 1st grade of the university. My first "blog" was cjse.ru(which is obviously closed now) where I published some articles about coding stuff with references to some programming books. To be honest there were pdf books available to download. For these books, I did not have the right to make them available to download on my web site. Yes, I did not know what the copyright was during that period of my life. I used WordPress for that web-site. But it did not last very long. I used this "blog" as a course work to pass a grade at the university and that was it.

Years have passed. I've done a lot of software development, founded an indie game dev company named Grimwood Team LLC with my friends, gathered a lot of experience in managing things in my life and work, made a few great travels around various parts of the world, etc. At the beginning of 2020 it happened that the external project I was working on has been stopped suddenly and there was no more job for me left to do and I had to quit my external job. I would say it was about time since Grimwood Team was experiencing not a good time and I needed to attend to its business.

And then COVID19 stuff happened and I stuck at home. I wouldn't say that it was a big impact on my developer's life. Life has been spiced up with skype calls. In the meanwhile, I decided to give myself a deep breath of fresh air and study web development. A nice adventure of studying what is going on in the web tech world now has started. I had to have a project to do to apply knowledge I was obtaining. Since I was a beginner in web development stuff I needed some practice. I did not want to let anybody down and take some ongoing project or start project from scratch as a freelancer because it is a great responsibility(and I did not have great power for that).

I did not count on my early experience in web development since many things have changed and I did not follow them up.

I've built a plan for creating a blog(which I actually failed with a month delay, but I am lazy ass have reasons for that).

At the milestone of building a plan, I've chosen a name salvicode. The idea of the name is simple: my full name is Sergei ALekseev VICtorovich(father's name) + code(which describes the nature of the blog). Actually I have a nickname salexivich already which also sounds like a name for the blog but I decided to leave it for other purposes. 

And during this period of time, my friend from Argentina has drawn "una caricatura"(sp.) for me. It was just like that:

I asked him to make it avatar-like and this is how the logo appeared. Here is the link to his FB page: https://www.facebook.com/Leonilustra. If you need a nice avatar don't hesitate to contact him. Thank you, man, if you are reading this:)

And I can not not to mention my dear Julia who has been supporting me in this journey(as well as in my life). She created this nice simple neat design of the website. I've tried my best to mark this up. I love you <3

The stars have aligned and I've started to study web-development and creating this blog.

I've built up a study plan based on Backend Developer Roadmap and Frontend Developer Roadmap and in parallel, I've built up a development plan for this blog.

Technical part of the blog

I won't go deep into the details of the technical part. Since each part of the technology sounds like a separate tutorial. I will just describe the technologies I used to build this blog.

As the main framework I use Django since I was already felt in love with Python and Django seemed to be easy to step in, besides that there are a bunch of tutorials over the Internet on it.

As the main stylesheet I decided to integrate Bootstrap 4.

I containerized my blog with Docker. So release configuration goes live with 3 images: web, db, nginx(There were a bunch of shaman dances to make it all work in production).

React is used for rendering comments part due to django-comments-xtd plugin - https://django-comments-xtd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/javascript.html. I wanted to redesign basic comments rendering so I jumped into the sources which are based on React.

That is it I guess. I think containerizing a web app like a blog is "overengineering" but anyway it all was done in purpose of self-education, moreover, Docker is a great thing. Talking about redundant stuff I think Bootstrap is the thing that I will probably cut off and will use some custom made thing.

Plans

During the blog development and reviewing all my past highlights, I've discovered a few things that I would like to share. I've dropped some ideas taken from my past in my ToDo. And also now I developed a habit to write down all ideas that come to my mind during development to my chaotic list. And then at the end of the week sort them out. So in the nearest future, I will post be posting articles where I will share some of my experiences(maybe some of them will be tutorial-like).

Besides that, I have some plans to redesign some parts of the blog. Remove bootstrap and write everything from scratch using sass, javascript(React maybe?), etc. to gain more experience in these technologies. To be honest I was thinking only about removing Bootstrap.

Also, there are some markup issues with code markup and small screens. 

So that's it for the plans. The general plan is to live my life.

Conclusion

Building something new(at least new for oneself) is a great adventure. If you are tired and a little bit exhausted I advise you to take a break, breath in deeply, and start studying some other direction of the area you are working in. It really helps to relax, get out of the system and come back to your "battlefield" with new ideas and energy ^^

I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.