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Project Launch

It has been a while since I've posted anything which is more to my detriment than anything else. I teach a class at UMASS Lowell and one of the things that I emphasize to my students to journal each week as they go through the learning curves that they have. The major reason for that is that it's very possible to do all the natural floundering around you do as part of learning something, find a winning combination, and then forget how you got there, especially after a few days (hours? minutes?) or not even realize what combination of keystrokes got you to where you are.

Over the past year or so, I've dived into several new technologies and techniques ranging from large scale React applications to cloud based testing servers to CI/CD issues. It's been a blast and mostly successful although there were many many of these learning curves where the actual steps to go back and recreate it might not be as smooth as they should be. As a result, I'm starting a series (with the best of intentions of finishing it) of starting a site from scratch and creating as thoroughly and with an up to date development environment and CI/CD system as possible in order to implement and document the techniques used. This will more or less be a microcosm of the last few years work.

The focus is on the architecture and environments rather than the actual site itself. In fact, the site is going to have a bare minimum of elements in it which are only there in order for the dev site to have something to act on, the git repos something to house and something to appear on the screen in order to prove that it worked. That being said, the site design does call for multiple technologies (React and ColdFusion), frameworks and libraries (such as Bootstrap and CKEditor) and scaffolding that will need to be set up along the way and an attempt at managing the process through Jira and Confluence.

Since it's easy to lose track of what we're trying to accomplish let alone why we want to accomplish it, I'll try to put a brief description of what the issues involved are and why they are important and then walk through the steps needed to recreate the end result.

Enjoy



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