Day Two Cloud 187: The Back End Of Bear Blog With Herman Martinus

Today on Day Two Cloud we talk with developer Herman Martinus about his open-source blogging platform Bear. We talk about how a developer views infrastructure and operations, and how he went about building his platform. We discuss: * Why Herman wanted to build a blog site * Dealing with scope creep and feature requests * How he looks at infrastructure * Bear Blog’s architecture, including Python, Django, and Heroku * Supporting users as an open source project * What developers would like ops and infrastructure folks to know * More Show Links: Bear Blog Bear Blog on GitHub herman.bearblog.dev – Herman’s blog Herman and Jason Spin The Yarn Podcast Transcript: [00:00:10.490] – Ethan Welcome to day two. Cloud. And today we’re talking with a developer. That’s right, a developer. We’re talking to someone who actually makes product and then hosts it on infrastructure. We’re talking to Herman. Herman is the developer creator of Bear Blog. It’s a minimalist blogging platform. Ned. Right. [00:00:30.410] – Ned That’s right. We found him. We tracked him down. We bagged him. We’re going to tag them. We’ll release them back into the wild when we’re done. But first, we got a lot of interesting perspective on how a developer views infrastructure and also how he went about building this sort of minimalist blogging platform. I found it, frankly, fascinating. [00:00:49.550] – Ethan Yeah, it really was a wonderful bridge between the world of developer and operations. So if you’re on the op side of the house and think those developers are just awful people, I think you’ll have a different opinion when you’re done listening to the show. So enjoy our discussion with Herman Martinis. Herman Martinez. I think I said that right. Right, Herman? [00:01:09.180] – Herman Okay, maybe I was close enough. [00:01:11.320] – Ethan Welcome to day two, cloud man. It’s great to have you on and tell the nice people listening who you are and what you do. [00:01:17.370] – Herman Yeah, great to be on. I’m Herman Martinez, and I am the creator of Bear Blog, which is an open source minimal blogging platform, and I work on that alongside a bunch of my other projects, but that’s where I’m spending most of my time right now. [00:01:36.190] – Ethan And Bear Blog is going to be the focus of our discussion today. But before we get into that, I think I noticed, doing my research that you have your own podcast, right? [00:01:44.770] – Herman Yeah, it’s a good friend of mine who works at AWS. So for you infrastructure people and we actually don’t talk shop that much on our podcast. It’s mostly just looking about at things that are interesting and having a nice chat once every two weeks. The main reason is he moved to the UK, and we just wanted a good excuse to have a chat every now and then. [00:02:12.650] – Ethan Yes. Okay. That sounds like fun. I should tune in and check out what you guys are talking about. Spy on you. Well, the focus of our conversation today, Herman, is Bear Blog. We do want to talk about your pet product here, so would you tell everyone, give us a summary of what it is at a high level? We’re going to get into the technical stuff as we go. But just for now, what is Bear Blog?