In January last year, I was up for a documentation manager role and I needed to come up with a solution that would serve the needs of writers and developer-contributors. My solution looked something like this:
Read More
GraphQL is an API query and manipulation language. Created by Facebook in 2012, it was open-sourced in 2015. In 2018 it moved to the GraphQL Foundation and introduced a schema definition language (SDL). It seems to be replacing REST as the standard way to expose public APIs. With REST, you have to define the inputs and outputs for each endpoint. Whereas with GraphQL, there’s only one endpoint and you define a schema. The user sends only the required data to get what they want back. And unlike SQL, you’re not limited to a single data source.
Read More
My first article of 2022 was on setting up a free personal website with GitHub, Hugo, Netlify and Forestry. But Forestry is due to be discontinued at the end of this month. So this is a rework of that article using Forestry’s successor TinaCMS. If you need to migrate, a tool and guide are available. Or you can do it the hard way and follow my article from earlier this year.
Read More
I launched the current version of my website a year ago. Having become a developer advocate in 2021, I didn’t think a WordPress site that hadn’t been updated in a decade would cut it any more. I wanted to do something a bit more modern. At my previous company, I’d built a developer portal on Hugo. The company ended up hosting the site itself, but I’d had discussions with Netlify and Forestry at the time. And I’d been using GitHub for my big open source projects for a long time. I picked a free Hugo starter theme from Themefisher that had built-in support for Netlify and Forestry. I spent a weekend on it: setting up the site structure, customizing the theme and adding content. I didn’t have all the features at first (search, tags and RSS came later), but it was a huge step up from my old site.
Read More