After a very active start to 2024, it's been a bit quiet around here, hasn't it. My last article was posted in May; the last review was, too. Oh, and wouldn't you know it, my last note was published around the same time. Huh! It's almost like something happened in the second half of May that caused some kind of blockage in my writing pipeline 🤔
Except, if you're reading these words right here, then everything I've just said will seem false[1]. If you check the articles or notes feed, there's plenty of more recent content[2]. In fact, I count 28 reviews, 12 new notes, and even a whole extra article that have been published since June. But, if you'd checked this site yesterday, none of those were there. So what gives?
Honestly, I'm still not sure. There's a part of me that wants to keep scrabbling through my codebase and pouring over server logs, but at this point that's just wasted effort. What I do know is that something about my build pipeline changed in late May. Perhaps a Dependabot merge caused a critical conflict between some arcane combination of dependencies. Maybe Netlify updated a Node version or other core piece of infrastructure behind the scenes, causing the outdated version of Gatsby I use to no longer work. To be fair, perhaps I was doing something which now, four months and change later, I don't even recall. As I say, I don't know, and I never will; the cause will remain a mystery. The result, though, was simple: I haven't been able to publish anything new in months!
Being a fully static site, this didn't stop anything that was already live from working, which was a mighty good thing ‒ and a critical reason why I'm such a big proponent of this kind of tech stack! ‒ because I didn't have any time to spend investigating the root cause. Not at first, at least. I had weddings to attend, holidays to plan, and, just as I was coming out the other side of all of that, an unplanned redundancy to deal with. Yay! 👍
I tried to find a remedy in August, but after a couple of days attempting to roll back automated deploys, upgrading Gatsby, and rewriting large chunks of my build logic, I had a moment of clarity. Why was I spending so much time trying to salvage a codebase I didn't even enjoy working in any more? Haven't I been saying for some time that I wanted to migrate to something a bit less bloated and heavy?
In other words, realistically, might it not be faster (and more fun) to migrate to another platform?
Of course, I decided all of this whilst I was trying to release a blog post (the aforementioned "extra article") to squeeze in a token of participation for Blaugust, just before we were due to leave on a nearly month-long sequence of trips (again), which maybe wasn't the brightest idea, but in my defence, it almost worked 😅
In three days, I managed to convert all of the front end components, rework the API integrations, and port about 90% of the architectural logic over to a new codebase. I had all of the pages rendering, the various search systems were all working[3], sitemaps and feeds were all being generated ‒ heck, I even managed to fix a few little bugs along the way! But I couldn't quite set things live. Redirects were broken, and I just didn't feel confident that everything was actually working. So close, yet so far.
Well, I'm back at home now. Have been for about two weeks. I've spent most of that time feeling too ill to code and catching up on every other aspect of life, but yesterday I finally sat down, ran through my manual test list, caught (and fixed) a handful more bugs, and finally, finally worked out how to get redirects working consistently.
And so, without any further ado (or any more gilding of the lily 😉), I welcome you to a brand new chapter for theAdhocracy (confetti, music, strobes!) 🎉🎉🎉
...
What was that?
It doesn't look any different?
What do you mean‽ Can't you see the version number has clocked over to a shiny new ✨4.0.0.a✨[4]
🙄
No, no, you're right. Very little has changed... on the surface.
But take a look beneath that well-worn veneer and it's all change, baby! The fourth iteration of theAdhocracy is now powered by Astro, for a start. I'll leave writing up the pain points, anecdotes, and positives of making that switch to a later date; right now I'm just happy to have a site that works again 😂
Still, I'm not done. Not by any means. When I say this was a "lift 'n' shift", I mean it. Half of the code has literally been copy-pasted across from the old codebase[5], and the other half has been updated just enough to get it working. Honestly, I'd prefer not to be releasing it at this half-done stage, but I was getting tired of not being able to publish anything.
That's why I'm calling this an "alpha". My hope is that over the next couple of weeks, I'll have some time to refactor, refine, and rethink quite a bit of the code, structure, and functionality of the site. There's been a long list of things that I've wanted to do here, but Gatsby has been tripping me up and preventing it from happening. Now is the time to make those changes, and if this is an "alpha" release, then I can do so without worrying about version numbers or documentation or anything else. I can just get stuck in, and get things done.
After all, I'm still actively job hunting, and now that the wedding season has officially gone on a winter break, a worry stone would be a pretty nice thing to have to hand.
(PS: In case anyone is wondering what version three of theAdhocracy was like, I've archived the final working build of the Gatsby site at v3.theadhocracy.co.uk, hopefully indefinitely 😉)
