papertrail

Deploying a React / Node app on Linode with Nginx

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 13:33:20 +0200

I wrote a new project - but this isn’t the blog post about the project. If and When I write it, you’ll be able to see it here.

No, this is the blog post about how I got the new project up and running on Linode. Let’s go.

Starting at the “finish”

Web apps are never really finished, I think they’re at some point good enough to try deployment - like, good enough, but with room to grow. So it also came to be for my latest project, a React/Node.js app where I tried my hand at GraphQL data fetching. So the app was sort of finished enough (and during deploy it showed that it really wasn’t), so I went ahead to get it deployed.

Why Vegans Don't ..

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 09:37:06 +0200

.. visit zoos, ride horses or sing along to “Baa baa black sheep”

Some things in life aren’t very nice - actually, a lot of things in life can very not nice, if you think about it: war, famine, climate crisis (just to name a few global things), or stubbing your toe, fighting with a loved one, etc (to name a few very local things). The title is mainly referring to a slogan I saw on a T-shirt once:

The pursuit of happiness

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 10:24:15 +0200

Recently, I’ve been very concerned with the question of what it means to be happy, or what it means for me to be happy - so less of a search for the general phenomenon and more of a self-reflection type of search.

All of that started when I had the first psychotherapy session of my life. Already in the days before the appointment I felt myself be more “better” to myself and others - I expected some sort of cathartic moment talking to a therapist, and that expectation alone gave me a different perspective on how I conduct myself and the way I handle things.

I'm the Developer Now

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 11:16:07 +0200

So, this is it! Bootcamp over, certification in the mail - you are now a full-stack web developer. And to be honest - that is really, really cool.

I think most of us who have built their last projects are happy that the 24 weeks are over - it took a lot of time and effort from us that we spent coding and studying and worrying about coding and studying - it is nice to do something else for a change in our freetime other than that. But by no means do I want to suggest that I did not enjoy it - because I really, really did.

The Ironhack Experience

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 13:36:56 +0200

And so it begins - after waiting for almost six months, anticipation, and yes, in the last week or so - stress (almost), Day 1 of my Web Development Bootcamp experience is drawing closer. On November 29th I will sit in the “remote campus” (aka my home in front of my screens) and will receive my first ever face-to-face (Screen-to-screen?) lesson on web development.

So far in my learning-how-to-code-career it went from reading books to reading other books to reading StackOverflow to Google to Udemy (a bit) to CS50 (for 20 minutes) to listening to podcasts to video tutorials (mostly by Wes Bos) - to here.

Live like you give a damn.

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 07:15:14 +0200

The internet is full of blogs, full of people throwing their opinions and experiences out there.

Well, here’s mine: the vegan section of my blog.

My goal is not to be a vegan blogger. I decided to make part of my blog be about veganism because it’s a defining part of my personality - and this is a personal blog. I write about the stuff that moves me, and that I can actually write about, because there is progress and process

970 more to go

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 15:08:07 +0200

I remember the first time I ever heard about Wes Bos - I was probably putting our kid down for a midday nap, and in order not to be anxious to get out of there, I put in a podcast. I was fairly new to podcasts, but I had found one that was called CodeNewbie, and that seemed to really scratch an itch I had, namely: I don’t know anybody who either is a coder, works in programming or has any knowledge about it (other than a colleague who I couldn’t talk to because of work hours).

Linode Web Hosting

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 13:25:26 +0200

I don’t know exactly when I decided to switch to Linode for Web Hosting - I can’t pinpoint the day or anything, but certainly I remember WHY I did it. But let’s back up a bit.

Since I started coding (which seems AGES ago, but arguably for real that was in the last nine months) I wanted a webpage or website that I made accessible for the public - either via my Synology or a proper domain. Now, as you could read here, our ISP does not have public IPs available (and is currently still working on providing IPv6 addresses) which makes a pbulicly accessible solution for web hosting via the Synology no possible. So what I instead did was just tinker with web page building on localhost (I first installed XAMPP after reading about it in Paul McFedries’ book and ran simple index.html files there), basically just exercising clunky html writing, early style sheet stuff etc.

Ghost in the S̶h̶e̶l̶l̶ internet connection?

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 13:30:42 +0200

Why I wished I knew more about the inner workings of computers

For the last three years, I have gotten increasingly interested in how computers actually work. Sure, this comes years to late (from my current standpoint) but in the past I was perfectly happy to play games and cheat my way through them (the first of which was Age of Empires with little photon laser shooting soldiers.)

But nowadays, I want to KNOW how stuff works. More often than not it’s something like “Hey, how could I keep my monitors from going to sleep?” and after 10 minutes I’m down a rabbithole on Linux messageboards, sifting through information on systemd and symlinked services and whatnot. And while that is super interesting - it is also beyond me.

Wordpress Mania

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 07:14:57 +0200

Can you relate with this weird state of mind, where you fixate on an idea and stress yourself out over nothing in particular? No deadlines, just your own drive? I’m guessing, everyone had that at some point in their lives.

For a week at the end of October I almost did nothing else on the computer other than WordPress. Sure, I checked mails and such, but I didn’t do any exercises, tutorials, I didn’t code on a website project - I only went to the WordPress site of an NGO I am part of, and fired up the staging website.

Chaos and Confusion and also Catharsis (and a cat.)

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 13:33:09 +0200

Moving house is not very fun - it’s exhausting and stressful, especially when you’re like me and forget where you set down a tool immediately after setting it down, and then spending and eternity looking for it in all the wrong places while slowly getting angrier. Moving is also a lot more stressful for your cat (if you have one) - I got away with some deep scratches, he got a nice trauma. (But he got accustomed to the new place very quickly and struts about as if he were the owner of the building.)

Flexbox Fun

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 14:21:57 +0200

“Fun” seems to be THE thing when it comes to coding for me. Because it makes me happy, because it is fun, and so on, recursive logic yay.

Right next to “Fun”, or somewhere close AND diametrically opposed is “Frustrating”, which learning new things can and will absolutely always be.

In the last day (and night) and day I had the absolute pleasure to delve a bit deeper into the Odin Project foundations and play around with Flexbox. I had worked with it before, when I coded along “Head First HTML & CSS”, and did not at all know what I was doing. (As and aside: I learned some super rudimentary stuff at that time and set up a webpage on the local LAMP server, which centered around my cat. And I wanted to make it look neat, and what do you know - five minutes later I am deep into the rabbit hole on something about a Grid or a Flexbox, which at that time thought that was some kind of hack.)

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Johannes. In this blog as with most other online communications and all things coding I go with jmchor my full name is more reserved for alert situations, government documents or job applications.

^{The cat and I with a fun RGB filter}

I work as a Support Engineer for a software/marketing company based in Wiesbaden, which entails tech support, troubleshooting, testing and a fraction of actual coding. I am what they call a “Quereinsteiger” - which means that I’m millenial-ing my way through live. What it actually means is that after finishing school I did my undergraduate in Cultural Studies and Political and Social Studies, and followed that up with a post-grad in Cultural Studies. Afterwards, I spent a few years teaching Cultural Studies (at the same university) while also supporting myself as a service worker at the hospital cafeteria of the same university. Doing a doctoral thesis proved to be too much of an effort (as in: no matter how I went about it I couldn’t pinpoint a subject matter I actually deeply cared about to spent four years working on it without pay), so I decided to be done with the academic path and got myself a job in Mainz, and worked as media analyst for four years.