Infrastructure on Gene Reader

Part 1 - Building a CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions and Container Registries

eugene.reader@gmail.com (Gene Reader) — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 15:10:14 -0700

Building a CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions and Container Registries

I recently built a complete CI/CD pipeline for my Flask job application tracking app. Like my Hugo blog setup, I struggled to find a single source covering everything I needed. I found myself cobbling together multiple YouTube videos, tutorials, and AWS and GitHub Actions documentation just to get a working pipeline. There’s a lot of moving parts here, so I decided to split this into a two-part series.

Part 2 - Deploying to AWS ECS: From Container Registry to Production

eugene.reader@gmail.com (Gene Reader) — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 15:10:14 -0700

Deploying to AWS ECS: From Container Registry to Production

In Part 1, I built a pipeline that automatically tests my Flask app and pushes containers to both GHCR and ECR. I’m going to deploy those containers somewhere that people can use them. I’m going to use AWS ECS to make my app publicly accessible. (This won’t be accessible to the public, I’ll be spinning this down after the demo to avoid burning through my AWS credits and racking up costs.)

Building a RSS News Aggregator with GitHub Pages

eugene.reader@gmail.com (Gene Reader) — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 09:05:21 -0700

I find myself doom scrolling through content that an algorithm somewhere has decided I want to read. My browser’s “new tab” page often shows articles I don’t care about or don’t want to see. I realized I could take control by setting my own homepage. A page that shows the news I actually want to read, because I curated the list myself. I understand I could likely find an RSS reader website and build a feed that way, but this seemed like a simple enough problem that I should be able to do it myself without worrying about ads or algorithms.

Set Up Hugo Blog

eugene.reader@gmail.com (Gene Reader) — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 16:30:05 -0700

Setting Up a Hugo-based Blog on GitHub Pages

I will be showing you how I set up a Hugo blog, being published to GitHub Pages using GitHub Actions for free.

I chose GitHub Pages because it offers the ability to host static websites for free with minimal configuration, and I have a new interest in GitHub Actions. I noted that the “modern” method to deploy a website on GitHub is with Actions and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. While going through the process of deploying this blog, I found that no single resource had all the information I needed to get everything stood up. I figured, “hey I’m making a blog why not write what I wish I had” and that’s how this post came to be. The process is fairly simple from start to finish once you know where all the moving parts are located.