Last night I started this blog from scratch, manually writing the code for each element as I needed it. There’s really not much overhead at this point, not even an authentication system. I plan on deploying to production once I’ve done that and also after enabling https on the little test app I deployed today.

It took me around 4 hours to get Dokku set up on Mojave, but this included signing up for Hetzner in the first place and purchasing the server. It’s a bit more than what I’m paying over on Porkbun right now, but having the flexibility of creating pretty much anything I want is hard to beat. As I learn more I’ll move my personal sites over to this VPS. Now this would be fun to test against 65,000 visitors, which Porkbun and Jekyll handled easily with my last blog post about Vercel’s predatory business model.

Anyway, I’m proud of the work done today and I’m glad I’m taking notes along the way. There’s much left to learn.

In summary, today I:

• bought a Hetzner VPS
• installed Dokku
• configured SSH keys to access my VPS and deploy dokku apps
• deployed a Sinatra test app over HTTP

P.S. While Dokku was installing I read about Paul Ford’s tilde.club blog post and it’s gotta be one of my favorite posts of all time. I think it’d be cool to start one of those, or at least join one. We’ll see.