Check out my new blog website, where I’ll be writing about Web development stuff.

Hello, I’m happy to introduce my new blogging website built with Hexo, hosted on AWS S3 with CloudFront CDN, and AWS Lambda with API Gateway for dynamic stuff (contact form and the most popular posts which I’ll be adding soon). It took me about ten days to create this and describe a part of the process. I open sourced my theme, and anyone who likes the design is welcome to use it on their website.

Read this post if you want to know more why I chose static site generator Hexo in favor of WordPress or similar CMS systems, and this one about the hosting.

The idea for this website is to be very fast. My focus was on few things - serving content with the lowest latency possible, caching pages (both on CDN and browser), and reducing the time for page rendering.

Bellow is the Pingdom Website Speed Tests screenshot. Performance grade is not 100 just because of the Google Analytics caching value. There are simple hacks for this, but I didn’t want to bother because it’s just a number which is not affecting real user experience. My concern is fast page rendering on both desktop and mobile devices. An earlier post described what I did to get from 700 ms to 200 ms for the first frame paint on a simulated 3g network.

Stay tuned to read more. I will be writing a post about some Single page application dos and don’ts, and Web development in general with a focus on speed, user experience, and application design. I’m currently evaluating some front end frameworks, and playing with Serverless.js, meaning you can expect more posts in that category.