Welcome!

Hi. I’m Ronen.

I have been developing software since I was 13 and will hopefully get to continue as long as I can :-)

Initially beginning with WinForm apps in .NET, I moved to using C++ as I was looking to learn how operating systems work as a systems developer. I enjoyed this greatly, and I got my first job at Cyren as a C++ developer after being released from the IDF.

Initial Beginnings

My first job was working on a legacy C++ app with about ~500K LoC (yes, I used Cloc. Yes, it excludes third party dependencies). It was a big challenge, especially since at that time, I had no experience with codebases that big; usually the only things I worked on were small-sized, self-contained codebases, that were either architect by me or by someone in the team I worked at.

I enjoyed the work very much, but eventually something dawned upon me - is this it?

Meaning, is C++ the best we can do as developers?

My knowledge up until that point was purely from self-study; I had not done any academic coursework up to that point. So to me C++ was an obvious choice when writing high-performance applications.

However, upon discovering Rust, my mindset was completely changed…

Here I suddenly came upon a language (and corresponding toolset) that changed everything I thought about what to expect from a systems language;

1. Turns out, you can actually have safety without compromising on performance and ease of development. You don’t have to be scared every time you run something.
2. Your build system doesn’t have 20+ years of legacy cruft that catches you off guard when you forget about it (I used CMake, which is pretty much the golden standard of C/C++ build systems - which should tell you something).
3. Your compiler actually has nice errors for the most part, and it turns out you can actually use this to learn the language!

Then I discovered WebAssembly, which Rust supported as a first-class compilation target, and that pretty much sealed the deal for me.

I wanted to learn Rust and write with it whatever I could.

A Change in Direction

Sadly, wanting to do something and actually being allowed to do it are two different things, especially in a capitalist system.

Being unable to use Rust at work was a given, since we could barely take the initiative to use C++11 (it was early 2018). Rewriting stuff in other languages that were more familiar for the team was also a no go.

Jobs that required Rust also required other job experience I didn’t have - in particular, modern backend architecture, which I had zero experience with at the time.

Because of this, and after a brief pause in 2019 for school (studying for a Bachelor’s, which I sadly did not finish), I decided to go in a different direction entirely - web development.

Why Web Dev?

The first time I did web development was working on a PHP backend when I was still in high school. This was late 2011 or so. LAMP stack was still hot (I guess. Maybe. So I was told), so that’s what I used. To cut a long story short - the guy who I worked for was a real bastard, and I hated every single moment of the work.

I hated it so much I actively avoided web development for almost a decade.

That, and a lot of people around me told me that web development is basically centering divs and adding some basic styling to them. Nobody told me anything about the last decade of innovation in that field.

Eventually I realized that all I really wanted to do is to make things people would enjoy using. I enjoy making things from scratch and I actively seek to know at least something in every part of the design and implementation. I want to do something better, and I want to eventually own the fruits of my own labor.

By doing web development, I can realize this dream by building something that users can actually use (or at least try to :-)).

So finally, we come to the creation of my own personal website…

Creating This Blog

Most of my projects are done for my own sake; I wish to learn something new, and in the process, maybe get to something that will also help others.

Despite it being a bit of an overkill for this kind of application, I decided to use the following stack:

1. For the frontend, I’m using React with Next.js. Blogs are best statically rendered, and I wanna do proper SEO, which is something Next.js supports very well.
2. For my CMS, I’m using Strapi. Because I’m under time constraints, I did not wish to roll my own CMS - my main focus was on Next.js and Edge deployments (see next point). I configured it with Postgres, simply because it’s something I’ve had some experience with before - although it doesn’t really matter, since everything is handled by Strapi itself.
3. An object storage bucket is hosted on Linode. Honestly, the S3 dashboard confused the living hell out of me and, for time considerations, I decided to use Linode’s service for this.
4. Everything is then deployed on Railway. I like their simple and straightforward way of doing any kind of edge deployments. It is my first time using it, and so far, it’s a blast.

Things that I considered:

1. I considered hosting the frontend app on Vercel instead of Railway, since it provides better metrics. In the interest of keeping it simple, I decided to deploy everything in the same place, but this might change in the future.
2. Using Sveltekit was definitely an option. I love Svelte and its revolutionary approach to the way it handles client-side JS. However, I know Next and React decently well, so I decided to eventually go with that instead.
3. Astro looked interesting, but I haven’t had the time to look into it.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy your stay, and find my writing interesting.