Michael W Bogucki
About Me
If you want to learn more about what I do professionally, you can find me on LinkedIn.
Please feel free to contact me if you would like to chat!
My background and degree are in computer engineering. By day, I'm a devops/cloud engineer working for Yello Co. By night, I can be found in the lab tinkering away on some hair-brained scheme.
I've always been into anything technology or science-oriented. I spent most of my childhood taking things apart or building all manner of weird contraptions. Ask me sometime about my failed hang-glider attempt. :) Being a habitual tinkerer, over the years, I've dabbled in electronics, robotics, embedded micro-controllers, hydroponics, virtual reality, welding, machining, cnc, linux, linux, linux, and more linux.
In college, my professor and mentor, Dr. Sompolski, steered me towards Unix and later Linux. This set me on a career path towards the IT-field. I spent perhaps 14 years working as a Unix-Systems Administrator, and as of a few years ago, migrated towards the DevOps culture.
About This Site
Back in 1995-1996, while attending UIC, I created the original version of this site as part of an Intro to Computer Science Class. Back then, it was basic HTML, without CSS or anything else.
Over the years, I've upgraded said site, adding CSS, Javascript, and a perl-based photo-album.
At some point, a friend convinced me to move away from the dated-look and use something like Bootstrap. I initially created a bootstrap/jquery-based site, but never deployed it due to the amount of manual labor needed to maintain it.
This site was created with the help of Nikola, a static site generator.
Originally I started down the road, using Pelican. I liked how lightweight and fast it was, but I ran into many issues ranging from getting support and trying to implement a basic photo album.
Why Nikola?
Nikola is a python-based, static-site-generator. You create your site and posts, using a variety of lightweight markup languages, such as MarkDown, reStructuredText, HTML, Wiki, etc.
Nikola contains a ton of features such as:
- Easy page template cusomization.
- Page galleries and slideshows.
- Not reliant on database-technology. Everything is stored in a flat-file.
- Server-side optimatization by compressing files with gzip.
- Wide variety of plugins.
- Can easily be deployed via AWS/S3, GitLab, etc.
- Variety of website-templates.
- Did I mention it is written in python? :)
So, static sites are faster?
Yes, they're screaming fast. Since the web server only has to serve static content that was pre-built, static sites scale phenomenally well and return content in an instant. A CMS can use a large amount of caching to prevent database hits every time a page request is made, but this is an additional layer of complexity that still takes more time to serve up than pure static content.
What's this about security?
Since a CMS has a public-facing database, it is prone to security vulnerabilities. There have been critical bugs that leave CMS sites compromised within mere hours if they are not patched immediately after the bug was reported. Nikola does not have this problem, since it is really just a Python module, and a bunch of flat-files, that run on a server.