This article aims to document the humble tech stack behind postmodernists1848.ru

It all started in summer of 2023 when I started experimenting with web. I didn't have any experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript at the time, because low level programming was much more interesting for me. But my friend (not a programmer, just a 3D artist) asked for some guidance on how to build his personal website which he needed for job offers. Thinking of myself as a real programmer, I believed I could figure out everything on the fly. And yeah, while most of the advice that I've given was useful, my lack of experience required to fiddle with CSS and HTML and JS myself a lot. That inspired me to build my own site.

Version 1 was actually a static site deployed via GitHub pages. It was at that time that I added the /funi page, a typing game in JavaScript. I implemented a sidebar page into which different "contents" pages were injected with XHR or fetch API in JS first. Then I decided to go for another approach and split those into actually separate pages which were generated during build step with a Python script that used Beautiful Soup library for parsing HTML. I used CI/CD that builds this and deploys using an action for gh-pages.

I also learned about CORS and the fact that I can't just fetch anything in JavaScript from the client. My hack was to use some random CORS proxy.

I wanted to make something real. At that time I also learned Go and knew it was really good for backend development, which eventually proved to be true. So I wrote my own Go server for this website. First commit is dated September 30, 2023.

Now, I didn't have to use a CORS proxy to fetch /log from PasteBin (which is how it works; I just write my notes on PasteBin to then fetch them to serve to users). Also, no need to build multiple files with Python. I could leverage the power of Go templates to generate the pages. I obviously enjoyed server programming much more than the HTML, CSS, JS unholy trinity. That's why I created the GithubLines package for counting lines in a user's GitHub repository and displayed this functionality on the main page.

Old version of the website is still available at www.postmodernist1848.ru/old/

I used free hosting providers throughout the entire lifetime of this website prior to this point. In October 2023, I moved to a container as a service platform called Back4App, so I had to apply some docker knowledge there, too. I was using Render before. The application did spin down after 15-30 minutes of inactivity. Shh. Don't tell anyone: you can actually send a request to your server every 15 minutes to avoid the shutdown. You'll face a CPU limit, though. Recently, I moved to a cheap VPS, which is just incredible. Not a lot of computing power, but I didn't have much in the first place. I gained something really important. And it is full control over deployment. Now, I could use GitHub CI/CD to build a docker container on push to master. Later, I came up with an idea of creating a little chat web app. During a terrible day, when I couldn't do anything else (bad night's sleep), I decided to kill the time until the night with some fun programming and implemented the chat on the website. This required adding a database. I chose the simplest solution for the little amounts of data that I had, which is SQLite. I also had a single server instance, so I didn't need a remote database. Super simple to integrate into the server. Just add this dependency and you'll gain access to the sqlite3 database driver. Technically, this website now has /api/chat-messages, /api/send-message API endpoints, together with /api/countlines/. Although, the APIs currently just straight up return an HTML list (maybe that won't be true in the future, because JSON feels like a more sane solution, but what I did is the simplest one for my site), you can write your chat client for desktop, mobile or another site.

The final stage of this website at which it is right now came when I decided to do a complete redesign of the website. You can compare it to the old one and see it for yourself. And yes, I do miss the absurdity and coziness of the old postmodernist1848.ru, but I wanted to try out something more professional and cool-looking. Also, I watched a video and was inspired by Josef Müller-Brockmann's design you can see on main page now. I had to leave out some legacy code for the true fans of postmodernist1848.ru, though, to make it available at /old/.

I started noticing that with more Go code and a new dependency the build times were awful. GitHub jobs took longer than 2 and a half minutes to deploy on new commit. For the entire time I thought that I just had a bad VPS. Still, I attempted to research this issue. I found out that docker can cache the dependency download stage (go mod download) this cut down build times by over 100 seconds, I think. Another big discovery was the ability to cache Go compilation locally to reuse for docker builds. This made the build times blazingly fast with workflow run times of under 30s. Locally, building the image took 8.2 seconds.

My SO (not Stack Overflow) submitted my website to a Golang streamer to review and I got a few messages that injected HTML into chat. So I added html.EscapeString.