Here are some loose thoughts on what I've been tinkering with for the past months or years.
As of lately, I've been working on Folio—the content-management system this site runs on—to add new features, fix bugs here and there, and make it easier to deploy it across multiple websites—including mine and client sites. The system keeps getting better and better and I repeatedly ask myself whether I'm reinventing the wheel in many areas. I make use of great third-party packages developed with care and thoughtfulness by other developers. It's incredible when they work but awful when other developers stop updating and your code breaks. I now pay more and more attention to those GitHub starts (★) and pick carefully what packages to implement. Software rots.
I've learned a lot about managing my own Linux machines—both from scratch or from an existing image—to have a new site ready within minutes (at least, when I don't hit an unknown problem that steals a few hours from my day). I'm mainly deploying apps with Nginx and Laravel but I've also learned to run and deploy Node.js apps (with PM2), how to serve Docker images, or how to run Python and Golang programs.
I'm trying to thoroughly document all the troubleshooting I go through to not have to dig the internet to fix a bug I've fixed some time before. While it's obvious how to fix a bug you encountered yesterday, some bugs don't show up again for long, and you can save hours of work by keeping good notes.
A recent practice I've started playing with is creating automation files. I'm slowly getting acquainted with "Makefiles," text files that describe commands which are a list of command calls that will be executed after you type make command-name on your Terminal. These commands not only run on Linux machines but on the macOS terminal, so I can run most of my automation scripts both on the desktop and Linux servers. Here's a sample Makefile to setup a Digital Ocean droplet.
I build Folio mainly for myself. There are many systems like it but this one is entirely built by me, and it helps me learn new programming features as well as modern patterns and techniques by browsing other people's code when I use their packages. Many will hate Folio—simply because it runs on PHP—but I believe Laravel is making this programming language great again. (Trust me, I did PhpNuke sites back in 2003 and this is light years ahead.) Laravel feels like an updated version of Ruby on Rails.
I'm migrating most of my sites to Digital Ocean. Their droplet system (without hidden costs) is great. I'm still to see where to put Getting Simple's podcast audio files. A powerful package by the Spatie team makes backing up websites a breeze: I can schedule automatic database and file backups at desired time intervals, even uploading them to multiple disks (such as Digital Ocean Spaces, Dropbox, or Amazon S3).
I've recently started using Imgix to distribute my images and remove that load from website servers. The image-processing REST API they offer makes is flexible and removes many headaches and time lost manually editing images with Photoshop or other applications, might it be to apply simple effects, sharpening, resizing, or even adding watermarks or padding. And their CDN makes their distribution faster.
I rely less and less on TypeKit for web fonts, as I either serve the font files or use Google Fonts. There are also beautiful typefaces from type foundries that I might use soon. (Milieu Grotesque comes to mind.)
A big highlight (that sadly only runs on macOS) is Laravel Valet. After spending months learning how to configure Nginx blocks and crashing the system multiple times I found this simple tool that handles everything for you. There's a bit of reading to do to fully understand what it does but I'd summarize its benefits to two commands: valet link and valet unlink. With one command your computer serves a PHP app at http://app-name.test from the directory in which you run the command and the second command stops serving it. You can quickly register a folder to serve an app (say, with valet link nono) and quickly go to its URL to test the site locally (at http://nono.test). Behind the scenes, Valet uses dnsmasq, php, and nginx. Not having to deal with them on a daily basis makes things easy (even though I like to learn what's behind these systems and how to do it the manual way in case there's a need for it).
Another thing I'm loving are Cron jobs. They can be set either on Linux (as I do on Digital Ocean) or macOS with crontab -e. You also have to learn a bit about how Cron works but the short story is that it lets you schedule tasks: command executions at whatever time interval (or time of the day) you want. For instance, * * * * * curl https://google.com would ping Google every minute. And you can go from every minute to certain times of the day or fractions of the hour. Laravel copes with it by letting you schedule commands with a clean, high-level API (for instance, ->everyMinute() or ->dailyAt('17')). All you do is set a Cron job to execute the Laravel schedule every minute and Laravel decides what commands to run when.
Last but not least, I'd highlight the importance of logging. Most environments have ways to log executions and errors and this is the easiest way to find out what's breaking your system. I've added a route in Folio's administration in order to visualize logs from anywhere and, at a lower level, Nginx lets you log access and errors as well.
I'm constantly learning, and Folio and my website are my playground.
As I started saying, these are loose thoughts of many of the tech I've been exploring over the past year. I'm also learning about Docker, TensorFlow, Runway, and much more, and frequently keeping my notes on Dropbox Paper. Some of my experiments are kept in the open on GitHub, and I've recently started sharing what I'm learning on this YouTube playlist.
What are you tinkering with?