Pandemic Projects
My pandemic projects for 2020/2021 have pretty much been the following…
- Work on my MGB
- Learn some new skills
- Stay sane
- Stay healthy
I started this nth generation of my site (where n>8) on Thanksgiving Day, since I didn’t join the family at my mom’s house. I’ve had 4 days learning how to deploy Jekyll properly and configuring S3 and CloudFront to deliver static websites with SSL. My work has me mucking about in AWS frequently, so it was a lot easier getting this site running than it might’ve been in years past.
Another thing I’ve learned is about invalidating content cached in CloudFront that’s hosted in S3. This has a direct impact on my work, so it’s been a good exercise.
One thing I learned in deploying this page, for example, is how to use the :not() pseudo-class selector for CSS, so that the emoji images in the list above aren’t styled like other images. That took about 20 minutes of intense Googling. Oddly enough, the best description was not on StackOverflow.
My real need is to force myself to sit down and create content when the mood strikes instead of just watching a ball game or skimming through Reddit. Those distractions have been around for years, but they are easier to indulge in the current environment. I’ll work on getting better. I have some content from previous iterations of this site, but I’m less inclined to bring it forward. Most of it was related to previous jobs and not terribly relevant any longer. I kept it around to show as part of my portfolio, but in 2020, LinkedIn works well enough.