Cloud-Costs on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Lessons learned from 2 years of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I began running Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive almost exactly two years ago, with a simple goal: Create a straightforward way for Finnish language learners to access the simple news broadcast by YYYY-MM-DD. It has basically accomplished that goal, with only a few tweaks here and there to keep everything running.

Earlier in the series: Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive. I stand by those points, and have some more to add here at the 24-month mark.

The self-hosted to DevOps engineer pipeline

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What’s the best way to get a job? Show someone with a job to do that you can do the job within their iron triangle. What’s the best way you can show someone you can handle a complicated k8s deployment, with 7 different CNCF-approved add-ons, zero-downtime rollouts and a whole bunch of YAML files? Probably by competently and publicly running your own complicated k8s infrastructure.

Self-hosters remind me a lot of the sysadmins of yore, who mostly ended up in the profession because they just couldn’t help but mess around with their underlying computing machine until they knew all kinds of weird nooks and crannies within it. I trace my own lineage in software deveopment back to the day my parents finally purchased a Dell laptop and a 300 Kbps Internet connection (residential wiring in Boston left something to be desired), and promptly broke the Windows registry and installed Ubuntu without them ever realizing anything had changed. The next year I got my first internship through a high school program as a Unix admin intern at Akamai, and the rest is history.

Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written, interesting practice material, and no easy way to access it!” So I went out of my way to create such a way, and me and my language skills have been profiting off of it ever since. A very small website, for a very specific need, just leaves a delightful aftertaste in the mouth.

Cloud translation is more expensive than I thought

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Example from yesterday’s news. Count ’em yourself – there’s 76 of them there.

Mass i18n efforts like this are I think an underappreciated benefit of what static site generators like Hugo can give you. Actually, especialy Hugo – it’s multi-language support is very good, like darn near everything about the platform once you get past the initial learning curve.

Another underappreciated benefit: When building HTML pages is fast, you can afford to build a lot of them. A quick hugo && cd public/ && fd html | wc -l tells us that there are about 2700 HTML files on the site, which Hugo builds in under 3000 ms on my machine. The Github Action run which built the site as of today took a glacial 35 seconds by comparison.