Comments are here to stay

The wonderful people at Disqus have given me a plus subscription (worth $10 a month) for free as my site is a personal blog/non-profile.
I guess that means that the comment section is here to stay. Which is pretty good. Considering this is all statically generated, and Disqus plugs into Hugo as part of the built in code, I like it a lot.

Considering the speed of the site, the cost of running it and the ability to be completely dynamic with it, I’m seriously impressed.

It gives me the functionality of running a fully fledged wordpress instance with photoblog backend, server running processes and a database server. But without any of that. It’s just a statically served website from an S3 bucket. It’s got SSL provided for free via a cloudfront distribution. It’s fast. It’s cheap and it’s very adaptable.

Stuff like this just excites me, you know?

Cloudformation, YAML, markdown, source control, build pipelines.

If I could go back even 5 years and show 2015 me the sort of stuff I’m into now, it would have blown his tiny little mind. Heck, if I could go back to 2001, it would feel like witchcraft.

Just having the ability to provision and spin up a server in the cloud in a matter of minutes rather than waiting for a quote, approval, purchase order, order, stock, delivery, then finally getting your hands on the kit and having to try to figure out how the hell to get hold of the installation media (Even USB sticks back then were a pipe dream, we were still using floppy disks)

Whilst overall, 2020 has been a bit of a shitshow, there’s no denying that the technological advances made in the last decade are astounding. The ability for entire businesses to work from home, for teachers to set work that children can do remotely and for society to carry on pretty much exclusively without cash, is somewhat remarkable.