Welcome to my Web Dev Sandbox!

Upcoming Initiatives

Return to the Website

It's beeen a long two years, with a lot of driving back and forth across the country as well as the passing of my mother, and it's been many months since I turned my attention to this little project. I have had the chance to work with new technologies at work, but I've done little so far to dig through the features of .NET that I mention below. For now, I am creating pages to support the planning of a camping trip with some friends who I am very fortunate to have reconnected with (shoutout to Ben Barsocchini and Alex Parker, whose wedding was beautiful and full of love, for making that happen). This will further my skills with html/css and most likely involve the addition of angular to my skillset, as I intend to keep a database of different suggestions and records related to the trip and will need the ability to display them.

.NET Framework

While this process began and will continue with the front-end web development skills that I never learned, I'm throwing another set of new backend skills into the mix. I am slated to join a new team in my day job that will be creating a new web application in .NET, and I will be one of two backend developers working on this new offering. As a result I am going through some end-to-end-pluralsight training on .NET Core and its latest features. To be frank, my work with .NET thus far has mostly been with old and largely defunct .NET web application frameworks, so I am hoping to not only learn how to work well with the latest version of .NET in general, but to learn some concepts I've fallen behind on in my code monkey days- such as working with MVC. I've been learning a lot of foundational and hardware/IT/devops oriented stuff lately to fill out my knowledge so my frontend and docker skills haven't gotten much focus, but my understanding of networking and the OSI model have exploded.

CSS, Bootstrap, and Dog Pics!!

While at the time of writing I need to get to bed, I just finished re-learning the basics of HTML and CSS and will soon be learning how to apply them a bit more practically, and then hopefully moreso with bootstrap. Once I figure out the basics of laying things out nicely, I'll post some dog pics for my millions of adoring fans. At this time, that page is up but not very attractive. Thus far my exercises have mostly been in formatting- deciding how to make something look pretty is not my strong suit, so I'm not attempting to make any highly attractive pages with my current skills.

Containerize my Webserver

I like the idea of starting to practice container use for app development and deployment, so to get my feet wet I'm going to dockerize this web server/reverse proxy (should be pretty easy), as well as the other services I currently run. Naturally I'm still taking things slow when it comes to changing publicly accessible stuff. I've done a good job of hardening my network and such but it'd be easy to mess that up when setting up a new deployment system. Frankly, this biggest holdup on this is that I'm going to do it inline with swapping over from Ubuntu Desktop to Ubuntu Server, and I hesitate to bring down my gaming servers long enough to accomplish the OS refresh and the dockerization.

Completed Initiatives

Fix Gaming Server Issues

Sunk a good amount of time into increasing the safety of the data on my Valheim server, but I'm now turning back to my projects and continued education.

SSL/TLS/HTTPS

Got SSL set up on the apache server. This applies to this static website as well as the browser-based service that is already running.

Reverse Proxy

My initial and primary purpose for this apache web server: a reverse proxy, to allow me to use my domain name for existing services and any services I might run or develop. Currently I have it situated to expose some gaming servers, but since I get a basic static web site out of this "for free" so to speak, I can use it to practice my HTML and CSS skills (which I'm doing now- I maaay just be backfilling the "Completed Initiatives" section from memory :p)

Buy and Use Domain Name (and other DNS playing)

Bought and set up the wubleu.com domain name on AWS Route 53, learned more about DNS and set up my own local DNS server. The local DNS server is via dnsmasq within my network and mostly just set up to allow identification of internal hostnames, and from there it's right on up to Google's authoritative nameservers.

Harden Server Ecosystem

Using my new networking knowledge (combined with what I learned in trial and error getting back into linux and setting up services), I put a focus on security for a bit and hardened up my network. In anticipation of hosting more services in the future, I also made plans to keep my network safe going forward. I won't say more on this subject for fear of getting unproductively specific.

Start Playing with Network/Servers/Linux Admin

After spending some time learning about networking (and later other related facets of linux administration and service deployment), I realized I could start toying with the computing resources I had available. I put together the new "big server" to run services and set up the "small server", initially intended to run network tasks like file sharing and routing. I immediately deployed one gaming server via simple port forwarding and set up a file share (which was soon abolished) on the small server.