My personal website

Hello world!

About

Created with Remix Run Epic Stack

The Remix Run concept resonates with me as an outstanding "project generator". I'm a firm believer in the value of using time and energy wisely. With this in mind, I took advantage of the Epic Stack's opinionated best-practices, enabling me to bypass the exhausting and repetitive process of setting up standard features such as frontend, backend, database, auth, UI, deployment, testing, and more.

The result is a full-bodied app brought to life with a single command line, which I believe encapsulates the potential for even more dynamic and full-featured concept building. This aids in bringing products and ideas to market as swiftly, reliably, and scalable as possible.

Project Goals

This project started as a simple idea - to build a digital portfolio that showcases my skills and experiences as a web developer. With a background in creating full-stack apps for startups in sectors ranging from computer vision and chat bots to health tech and e-commerce, I felt the need to establish a platform where I could share my work.

While not all my professional details can be shared here, I hope this site provides a glimpse into my capabilities through the various links, blog posts, and other elements that make up this portfolio.

Development

• Initial setup:

npm run setup

• Start dev server

npm run dev

Kent C. Dodds who graciously built this stack has also inserted himself as the development admin user so check here for the login details (which you can change) and his kind message

Deployment

If you choose not to deploy your app, you can simply comment out the deploy: job in .github/workflows/deploy.yml.

Fly.io

Troubleshooting:

• Interesting discussion here about why deploying the Epic Stack is not-so-easy after all
• Deploying on npx create-remix ... was hanging on the secrets updating for the prod app (staging appeared to get set up properly though)
• Paying close attention to this part of the discussion

Follow closely with these steps and reference:

• 🚨 Do Not push your repo up after creating the GitHub Repository
• Create the two apps for prod and staging as per the deployment instructions
  • We are not using fly launch with epic-stack
  • Make sure to include the 4 digits appended to the app name in fly.toml
• Create the Fly API token and save in the REPO secrets, not .env
  • Instructions for Creating encrypted secrets for a repository here
• Add a SESSION_SECRET and INTERNAL_COMMAND_TOKEN to prod and staging as per the deployment instructions
  • Potentially controversial since the Fly.io dev in the interesting discussion is suggesting fly launch takes care of this, but these seem specific to Epic Stack
  • Actually, look at this conversation about the secrets and keep in mind for future epic-stack "generations" with Fly.io
  • These also appear to be generated from the initial build, but that could just be as a key value for development
  • This commit sets up deployment from the init script which is great if you want to deploy right away and it works
• Resend for emails as per the deployment instructions
• Sentry for bug-tracking as per the deployment instructions link
  • Don't have to deploy Sentry to staging
• Create volumes for prod and staging as per the deployment instructions
  • Use the right region for you and update the primary_region in fly.toml
  • There will be a warning about downtime if only 1, but you can change that later
  • If you are redeploying then the app will be down while the new one is building more here
  • Kent C Dodds with a verbal explanation here around the 2:45 mark
• Attach Consul (limits writes on db)
  • More details here
• Finally, now you can deploy your branch 🙌
  • Perhaps try dev first to see it deploy and then merge to main to see it in prod

Tests seem flaky at first, but work eventually to deploy to dev??

Deployment takeaway

There are certainly other ways to deploy an app, but I wanted to get a handle of the "Epic Stack" way in case the learning experince would be worth the effort (I think so)

A little frustrating that the Epic Stack was not able to deploy out of the box as advertised and required some troubleshooting, but issues with Fly.io and Playwright will hopefully be smoothened out and taken on with more experience going forward 💪