Coolify and Omakub brought me back into development for fun
It is the end of year and a lot of introspection comes with it. Given that work is a big part of my life (although I have been trying to diversify my activities so that I can detach my inner value from what I produce work-wise), I was meditating about my career as a software developer.
I have been blessed to have found a job right after school which opened up many doors in other companies so from the beginning I was already developing software for a company. I call it a blessing because in 2024, having a job in this economy is already a big feat. However, I don't have the story that is commonplace for most people who entered the space: "Oh, I had the need for developing a website for my <insert here the social gathering> then I started fooling around with website creation". Heck, my first real job in the field was creating Windows Desktop applications with MFC in C++. I felt like I skipped the fun and went straight into JIRA tickets and stand up meetings.
Detachment from the career
Although I was learning a lot and doing well enough to be able to change companies from time to time and even move to different countries while having sponsored work visas, I dare to say that I never truly felt the passion that most people I met in the software development space feel.
A big part of the blame comes to me though since I rarely engaged with the community as a whole. I can count on one hand the times that I participated into IRL events. Looking back, I can definitely see how much of an introvert I was!
So much so that I made more friends in other adjacent areas like UX Design and QA, which brought me to stop my career for a little more than a year and embark on a journey to become a Product Designer. Fun times, except that on my first real experience there were quite a bit of previously existent internal issues that made all my colleagues quit in a span of a couple of months. Traumatized, I went back to be a web developer and that's a story for another blog post. Moving forward!
Fast-forward to 2024's holiday break
Being in a very cold city in the middle of Canada can make you quite bored creative. I suddenly felt an urge to go back to Linux-land (I have been using Macs for the past 5 years of so) after watching a video from DHH about Omakub and wow! One command was enough to go from a fresh Ubuntu installation into a fully configured system with lots of sensible defaults and preinstalled apps. Wonderful!
$ wget -qO- https://omakub.org/install | bash
Inspired by the new environment, I am now tempted to retry using Neovim as my main code editor given that LazyVim comes already preinstalled and preconfigured!
Local development was set but how about deployment? For static websites there's quite a few free solutions out there but for something slightly more complex you either have to pay quite a bit of money or host it yourself in a VPS.
Coolify-ing my VPS
Having set up a few servers throughout my career with different tech stacks, I was certainly not excited for this part. However, after watching this Web Dev Cody video about Coolify, I was hooked. It was time to get on a VPS and try it out.
Again, just like Omakub, setting up Coolify was as simple as connecting to the VPS server and running a single command.
$ curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash
After the installation, you are prompted with a dashboard that matches (or even exceeds) the ones from famous companies like Vercel and Netlify. From there, deploying a static site or a full blown web app with multiple services is a breeze! Not to mention the notification system in case a deploy fails or any Docker container changes status, for example.
This website is currently being hosted there and it only took a few clicks and some ENV vars to be set for it to be fully live!
Here's to 2025!
I've started and dropped so many blogs throughout the years. There is absolutely no guarantee that this one won't be the same but as long as I keep the spark alive, I am sure that I will be coming back.
I am very very thankful for all the work that people do in open source and even though I am sure that none of them will read this blog post, special thanks to the maintainers of Omakub and Coolify for unintentionally bringing back a tired developer back to the keyboard one day before 2024 ends.