The Standup is an occasional review of personal projects that I have underway. Part journal, part public accountability, part announcement - these are the things I'm working on over the next few months.
Project Penguin: a web server migration
Twenty years of personal web hosting, as told by some chronological bullet points:
- 1998: FTP static websites to a shared www directory (thanks, WCNet!)
- 2008: deploy .NET Framework apps to a Windows server in my living room
- 2016: host websites/apps on an Azure VM for free
- 2021: Azure VM now costs $10/month
- 2023: Azure VM now costs $40/month
- 2025: Azure VM now costs $95/month
And that's my big project of 2026: migrating two dozen websites, web apps, and .NET code from an increasingly-expensive Azure Virtual Machine to a Linux-based web server. As convenient and reliable as the Azure VM has proven to be, cost predictability is more important to me.
The biggest surprise of all this? How insanely easy it is to run all my .NET applications on Linux - a huge change from when I started with .NET Framework-based apps in 2008. Despite my day job primarily being based on Microsoft technologies, I've always maintained Linux proficiency - and it feels good to flex those muscles again.
Trello-No-More: open source kanban
I've been a long term Trello user (hello, 2011) and I'm a big fan of Kanban in general.
- Work projects? Kanban.
- Wedding planning? Kanban.
- House shopping? Kanban.
- Building a Trello replacement? Kanban.
But 15 years is a long time to use one product, and alas, the enshittification of Trello has been underway for quite some time (but mostly since Atlassian purchased it). New subscriptions and nudges to subscriptions are commonplace. Trello still works, but it's icky.
Oh hey, I'm a software developer - let's fix that. With a bunch of JavaScript (naturally) and a small .NET/SQLite backend, I'm building out a Trello replacement that can be deployed cheaply and easily. The core idea is to make it as simple to use with just the essential task management features that Trello does right.