There are something like over a million ways to host a blog these days and for a personal blog you should choose something that’s easy to maintain and cost effective. This post covers how to get cheap hosting for a statically generated blog (or really any simple website) using Jekyll and Terraform on AWS.

This post is based on a talk I gave at the Docker NYC Meetup on September 28, 2016.

Modern software shops are running applications on a variety of operating systems, run time environments, and frameworks. Creating a continuous integration system that’s able to scale across such a diverse ecosystem can be operationally complicated, not to mention expensive. Applying some of the same techniques we use to isolate dependencies when hosting our software can help us to meet this challenge and enable developers to have more direct control over the build pipeline.

I was an early adopter of the Dell XPS 13 9343 “Developer Edition”. It came with a special OEM install of Ubuntu 15.04 that included support for a few of the laptop’s trickier pieces of hardware (e.g. the Broadcom wireless card). The laptop is an attractive little package. It’s got very narrow bezels, a decent keyboard, and is the thinnest, lightest weight laptop I’ve ever owned. That being said, there are some significant belmishes to this little gem.