Five Years Running a News Site on JAMStack

Part I: History and Architecture

I started working as the Director of Technology at Spotlight PA the Tuesday after Memorial Day, 2019, over five years ago. There have been a lot of changes in technology, journalism, and the world since then, not least of which was the COVID-19 pandemic. I thought this anniversary would be a good opportunity to look back and take stock of what went well, what went poorly, what I think would have been the best choice I could have made at the time, and what choices I would make if I had it to do again now.

I’m planning to write this as a four part series with the first part focused on the broad strokes history of Spotlight PA’s technical architecture and later parts drilling down on specific practices, services, and technologies.

“Five Years Running a News Site on JAMStack” has also been accepted by SRCCON 2024 as a session. I don’t believe the session will be recorded, so if you read this and are interested in learning more, please come see me in Minneapolis this August. SRCCON has always been my favorite conference, and I’m looking forward to being back this year.

Read more…

What’s New in Go 1.22: cmp.Or

Go 1.22 has been released for a couple of months as of this writing. It’s long past time to wrap up my series on what I worked on for 1.22. Sorry for the long delay, I’ve been busy with life stuff. Be sure to catch up on my posts about reflect.TypeFor and slices.Concat if you missed those.

The final function I proposed and implemented for Go 1.22 is cmp.Or. On Go Time, I called it “the hidden gem of 1.22”. It’s a simple function with a lot of potential uses and a surprisingly long backstory.

Read more…

Alternate Futures for “Web Components”

It seems like Web Components are always just on the cusp of finally catching on. They’re like the year of Linux on the desktop for frontend nerds. I keep reading the latest articles about Web Components as they bubble up on my social media feeds, just hoping that there is something that I missed out on and now they have more substance, but I always end up feeling disappointed. I wrote up my thoughts on Web Components back in 2020, and it doesn’t feel like the conversation has progressed in all that time. It’s like an Eternal September with people constantly going back to the original promise of Web Components, in spite of the reality having long since shown itself to have fallen short.

Read more…