Not too long ago I worked on a client’s CMS platform that needed a Google Drive-like UI so customers could manage their content inside the app.

Filesystems seem so mundane, and from the outside looking in, you could easily overlook how much complexity hides beneath them. Tiny details in the UI, backend routes, and database queries all have to align perfectly for everything to work cohesively.

Building a Google Drive-style filesystem sounds easy until you realize you’re not just making a folder view, you’re recreating years of UX polish and recursive data logic under the hood. I learned this the hard way on a client project where we had to ship a full cloud storage experience in just two weeks (which turn into more like a month).

HOTTAKE, I DESPISE CSS frameworks like Tailwind, Material UI, Bootstrap, and so on. Why? Well let me share my experience on working in production with one of these frameworks. Today I’ll review the pros and cons and try to convince you when you should hand-roll your own CSS compared to when you should not. Also some of the strategies I’ve found to work over my career as a developer for the past decade.

I was recently challenged with onboarding a customer to a clients digital signage system. I needed to migrate thousand’s of Linux IoT players from there existing stack to what we where developing in-house at the time. It was a challenge to say the least. There previous partner was shutting down there servers in a month! It was worst-case scenario. Screens would go black if nothing was done and millions would be lost in ad-revenue.

I’ve been using linux close to a decade now and I’ve pickup various amounts of knowledge from hopping from distro to distro. My journey has looked something like this: Ubuntu -> Linux Mint -> Manjaro -> PopOS -> Arch Linux -> Gentoo -> Void Linux.

I’ve picked up quite a few tricks and seen how some distro maintainers package things as well as different ways to bootstrap a linux system, but I’ve found that Void Linux has a nice balance between customizabilty, simplicity, and extencibility.

For as long as I’ve been using linux, I’ve always had the problem of setting up new machines to have the right configuration. I would always have to manually install, update, and configure my computers and servers to have the exact specs I’d need for the software I would want to run. I always found this to be frustrating and time consuming as I would always either be distro hopping, configuring servers to run my applications, or to just add obscure configurations I would have for each of the machines.

I don’t have to say that Google sucks. Some of there services are great, and trust me, I know. I’ve been a life long Google user for years and still to this day I at least use one or two Google services in my life. But the implications that come with your privacy and the right to your data and what you can do with it are limiting. For the last two years I’ve been working to move away from the Google eco-system and finding FOSS and self-hosted alternatives that rock!

I found myself needing to create a new website and stumbled across a project named Hugo! If you dont already know, Hugo is a static website generator built with the Go Programming Language. I just started using Hugo for my site (the one you’re on right now!) and it’s been one of my favorite tools for creating static websites.

At it’s core, it uses Go Templates to create webpages and markdown files for content. Creating content with Hugo is a breeze, even my grandma could do it, and the templating system allows you to create some awesome layouts!