Starting a development blog
Chinese Boost has been going since 2014, and in that time everything I’ve written here has been about learning Chinese. I thought it would be nice to also have a development blog to write about how Chinese Boost is built and announce new features.
This development blog does not appear in the site’s main RSS feed. It does have a feed of its own if you want to follow it.
The most recent stretch of work has been almost a total rebuild of Chinese Boost. The old Laravel application is gone. Chinese Boost is now a Hugo site, built into static files and published to S3 behind CloudFront. The S3 bucket, CloudFront distribution, DNS and TLS certificate are all defined in CDK.
- The redirects moved out of S3 routing rules and into a CloudFront Function.
- Local development doesn’t touch AWS at all any more. The CDK stacks get deployed into Yulin, a simulated AWS that runs inside a single Node process.
- Merges to
mainnow deploy on their own via AWS CodeBuild. The CodeBuild project lints, tests, builds and deploys the site.
Some of the new tools arose from things I needed for developing Chinese Boost, such as the Yulin AWS simulator. Another one is Colophon, which generates social share images for posts based on the YAML frontmatter in each post file.