Iain Davis

I've been pretty lax about working in a structured and organized way in my personal projects. Some of that has to do with life just kind of being a bummer lately. Unemployment is hard. But it also has to do with I just got into some sections of work that felt very unstructured and exploratory. I knew roughly where I wanted to get to, but I didn't know how to get there until I did a lot of learning and made a bunch of mistakes. Now, arguably, that's exactly the kind of stuff I should have been documenting. But doing it took a lot of my time and energy. Today, we're where we are, and there's no use pretending we're somewhere else.

It's been a long while. I haven't been posting, and virtually nothing has changed here at IainDavis.dev. But I haven't been idle either. Since I last was regularly updating, I made several decisions that have taken a good long while to carry out, and I abandoned some structure and communication while I was doing it. In retrospect, it was maybe unwise, but at the time it felt like quite enough to be dealing with all the things I was dealing with and also be doing the learning I needed to do to implement the changes I wanted.

Brief update to indicate some of the work I've done here in the last few days:

It's been a while since I posted here!

Actually, I posted here about a week ago about some of the things I was working on with Nova, but I wrote it in a bit of a rush, and I hated that blog post. It was disorganized and the content didn't really relate to the title at all, so I deleted it.

Since then, this week and a goodly chunk of last week have been all about producing content for this here website.

Streamlining the Deployment Pipeline​

Today, we took a major step toward automating the deployment of this site, eliminating manual steps and reducing the risk of errors.

Now, every pull request (PR) generates a preview build, and every merge to the main branch automatically triggers a production deployment. This new setup speeds up the process, ensures consistency, and minimizes the chances of mistakes.

Today, we focused on streamlining our automated preview deployment process for PRs, ensuring that each pull request includes a live preview of the Docusaurus site, Storybook components, and test reports.

The Challenge​

The main goal was to automate the deployment of a fully functional preview for every PR, complete with Docusaurus builds, Storybook, and test results. This meant dealing with dynamic URLs, managing build artifacts, and ensuring everything worked in harmony.

Why This Matters​

Automating the preview process means changes to the site are instantly available for review, speeding up development and reducing the chance of bugs. This allows us to deliver updates faster while keeping quality high.

It's been a few days since I posted. That's not because I haven't been busy, it's because setting up unit testing turned out to be much harder than I anticipated.

To be fair, I was trying to achieve a somewhat complex setup.

It's a best-practice in Docusaurus to include a truncation marker in your blog posts. That way, when you're looking at a list of posts, you just see a brief introduction from each post, instead of the full content of the first post pushing the second post clear off the page.

It's where all those "Read more" links are coming from on the main page for my blog.

The default truncation marker for markdown files looks like this:

<!-- truncate -->

Yesterday I posted about setting up Zapier to automate posting to my LinkedIn profile whenever I create a new post here.

I've since looked into alternatives and have moved from Zapier to Make.

This post is just a listing of some of the things I'm planning to add here in the coming days.