Starting Shikisoft Blog!

Today I am excited to start this blog to share our experiences in Shikisoft with the open source and cloud communities; as well as our followers. Since the decision to work in my own business four and a half years ago, I have learnt so much from both communities. Thanks to them, we have come so far and continue to learn every day.

This is the magic of founding a new business. You enter a different world than that you used to be in a corporate. You work hard, come across lots of difficulties, sometimes you are up sometimes down. However, you learn much more and I think despite all the side effects it is enjoyable!

What will this blog be about?

I am planning this blog to be about mainly these topics:

• Cloud solutions, mostly Amazon Web Services as I have all three Associate certifications at the time of this writing. This will be our main topic. I will be sharing posts about new services that AWS announces as well as my experiences about basic services such as EC2, S3, RDS, etc…

• Serverless computing. This is the next big thing. Nowadays, you don’t need to maintain idle servers. You deploy your code and it will be run when it is needed. Here comes API Gateway and Lambda. I will share my experiences about these services as well as their connections with other AWS services such as CloudFront and Amazon S3.

• DevOps practices. More than 3 years ago, I installed Open Source Chef Server in one of my Linodes and provisioned all the production environment of our application, Pisirpaylas, with it. Now, we can run our Chef recipes on OpsWorks. Besides, Docker and containerization is very popular. I will be sharing my DevOps journey here including infrastructure as a code concepts such as CloudFormation.

• Web development. I am an experienced in Ruby on Rails and Angular developer. I am a fan of behaviour and test driven developments. When you start using it, it becomes addictive. It takes time, but brings quality and confidence. Some posts will be about them.

• Announcements about Shikisoft. Some posts will be about us, what we are doing at the time of writing, our new projects, products and services, accomplishments, lessons from failures…

• Some new technologies, frameworks that we may start using. Who knows what the future holds?

What is the architecture behind this blog?

Shikisoft Blog is a Jekyll-powered blog and deployed on Amazon S3 as a static site and distributed using Amazon CloudFront. Jekyll community is doing an amazing job to maintain this awesome blogging engine. Also, thanks to AWS, it is cost-effective and scalable.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As I mentioned, this blog will be mainly about AWS, Serverless,DevOps and our company, Shikisoft.

Also, about the language… Currently, Shikisoft is my freelancing business and I will be the one posting articles. Hence, initially we and I, my and our are interchangeable. However, there are people supporting me and I prefer to use we in most situations and where it suits more.

Lastly, please let me state that, in this blog I will be sharing only our experiences, beliefs and practices. Nothing means that it is the only way of doing things. I will be trying to share our way of solving problems and our thoughts only.

Let this blog be the start of a long journey and give a chance us to give back the community!