New Year, Migration, Current state and Future plans

by dweller - 2016-01-04

[2024: updated Digital Ocean referral link]

Year++

So it happened, we made another orbit around The Sun. 2015 was a weird one. A lot of stuff happened, University happened. As I expected it wasn’t anything good, although small part of me hoped it would be useful at least in some way. Well exams are passed and that’s that. I also landed my first job, signed my first NDA, and got my first salary. Although due to some problems in the place (I don’t really want to disclose that in details), as well as me not really having enough time for both University and Job, I decided to leave it early. I’m glad they were really nice about it and understood me.

Here’s to 2016 being even cooler, and in a good way, weirder! [2024: spoiler, oh it all got weirder, not sure about the good part]

Migration

A Droplet in the Ocean of Data

Speaking of 2016, one thing I did this year was migrating my web site, you might have heard of it; in fact you’re on it. Yes, cabin.digtal has moved, and to a better place! It’s now on virtual server in the cloud! Yes the mysterious cloud that doesn’t actually exist, and in fact is another peoples’ computers. The provider is digitalocean.com, they’re pretty cool if you ask me. If you click that link and register, you will get free $200 in credit to use over 60 days (I get $25 if you spend $25)! [2024: I still use them to this day, and even though they started charging a bit more, it’s still cheap and enough for me on one of the lowest tiers (1 CPU core, 1GB of RAM)]

So here I am, own a server to do as I please with it. I AM GOD NOW, you might not get why I am excited, but previously this was hosted on simple web-hosting, all I had was a folder on someone’s server, FTP and MySQL access. But now I have everything I want, of course that meant configuring it all with my own hands. Fortunately, I loved that!

Let’s Encrypt

I also could finally use letsencrypt.org, which is an amazing tool. At the time of writing this blog entry, they are in public beta and I encourage people to use it. It’s free! As in freedom! They provide a simple installer (especially if you’re on Debian-based distro and use Apache) and generate keys for free. If you really liked it, and can afford it, please do donate for their cause, this people are fighting for free and secure internet!

Now on CentOS 7 (My OS of choice for servers [2024: not anymore]) I needed to do it “manually”, meaning I needed to tweak my Apache config file myself. But that’s about it, everything else was done by magic of Let’s Encrypt and some quick Googling. [2024: I do not endorse my past actions like using Google]

Current State of Affairs

Or should I say ‘stateless’, because I am learning functional programming. To be precise Haskell. And we try to avoid global states in FP (Functional Programming). I don’t want to go on huge tangent here, but I quite like it. It’s weird, it’s new, it’s fun. I feel like I am learning programming from ground up once again. Maybe it’s because, in a way, I do. It requires one to think in a different way from the imperative programming, it makes you think about what things are, rather than how to make them. I am still quite a newbie in it, but I can see some very nice things about it. (Although I do dislike significant whitespace, that rant can be dealt later)

getPlans :: (Future a, Plans b) => a -> [b]

As of today, I have a quite a list for future plans. I do not want to disclose everything, but I can say next:

More Functional Programming
Game Development
- A lot of small ideas
- Few bigger ones ;)
New Programming Language development (Think Glocal 2.0)
N-th try at Operating System development
And in general, my low-level level (ha, ha) needs to be raised (ha…)

Therefore, as you can see, I have a lot of stuff to do, so it’s better if I stop here and go make it happen!

Once again, Happy New Year people and take care of yourselves!