Hi 👋,

So... I've been writing blog posts for a few years. First on Medium, then at www.mikenikles.com and in about two weeks, I will release Cloud Native Web Development (https://gum.co/cloud-native-web-development).

With the current work-from-home environment, I save a good amount of time commuting every day. Initially, I invested that time into writing the above-mentioned book. This is now in final review and I am looking at my next project.

Current website architecture

My personal website at www.mikenikles.com is based on a proof of concept architecture. It uses Ghost.org deployed in a serverless environment called Cloud Run. The actual website is a static Sapper / Svelte application. Check out my blog post with more details.

The current architecture looks like this:

It's time to rebuild it. It's time to prepare for the next chapter of how I spend my free time.

Rebuilding my personal website from scratch

I am tracking the progress on GitHub at https://github.com/mikenikles/www-mikenikles-com/projects/1.

More importantly, I am going to live-stream the entire process on my new YouTube channel called The Software Architect at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgEvLz_YbByFqn8f32wh9lA/

The plan is to pick an issue on GitHub, work on it and record what I do. If you catch me live, great! Otherwise, all videos will stay on the channel to view later.

I focus on four goals initially:

• Ownership - Content & assets hosted on GitHub, anyone can contribute with a PR. No dependency on 3rd parties (e.g. CMS).
• Best practices - Performance, SEO, a11y, works without JavaScript, Lighthouse score of 99+, Core Web Vitals.
• Automation - GitHub Actions takes care of the entire CI / CD pipeline.
• Operating costs - As close to $0 as possible. No database.

Why should you watch?

As I develop the new website, I will experiment with new technologies, I will share my thoughts on best practices, I will teach, I will make mistakes and fail to achieve certain tasks in a way I had imagined. You can learn from that and avoid these mistakes in your projects.

In the end though, this is also a personal challenge! I've given many public talks, organized large meetups and led multi-day workshops with 20+ participants. Sitting at home talking to a camera is very different and I want to challenge myself.

What's next?

Subscribe to my channel if the above sounds fun. There are four videos I recorded to get started.
Follow me on Twitter @mikenikles for updates and a heads up when I will be live.

See you!