Making a Website

This is by far the largest adventure I've ever started by myself. Typically, I work with partners and we decide together on the stack and the major implementation parts. This time, only I decided which cool features I wanted and which corners I cut. I had total authority to prioritize setting up the email server before an actual website, so I could use me@marktai.com as soon as possible. Doing things by myself was both daunting and exhilarating.

I learned how to build a modern website this summer (2015) during my internship at Ooyala. My first few weeks I was flailing around and just trying to get a simple HTTP login to work. Over time, I grew to understand exactly why promises are better than callbacks and the infinite weird quirks of Javascript. Now I can see why AngularJS is such an amazing and simple framework as it just makes things easy.

My stack: NGINX to serve up an AngularJS and Bootstrap website and a reverse proxy to a Go server for the API. At the time of writing this post, the website is mostly static content, but I fully intend to add a bunch of features in the near future that use server-side processing.

I purchased marktai.com from Namecheap, a company that I find has an awesome customer support and lives up to its name with cheap prices. I also purchased an SSL certificate from Namecheap just to get the cute little green lock in the top left corner. When first starting this website, I really wanted to learn how websites works from top to bottom, so I decided to use an Amazon EC2 instance to get the most basic hosting as possible, instead of a packaged solution like DigitalOcean. All these components together let me share this very page with the entire world.

Taking my first steps into all of this was quite a leap. I looked up tutorials online on how to set up EC2 and Namecheap together, but there were some small problems along the way. Originally, I used my Windows desktop to edit all the files and to manage my EC2 instance, but it became increasingly grating to use PuTTY rather than a native terminal. Furthermore, I kept bumping into things that would work on my desktop, but not on my EC2 instance. However, I managed to push through and got a small little Bootstrap website working after maybe 5 hours. Thrilled, I showed my family that marktai.com was online, but they weren't very impressed with a large "This Website is Under Construction." But I was unphased, as I had wrangled with Linux, CNames, security groups, and a ton of other small problems along the way. I've since added features like iRedMail, a fancier template, path forwarding from marktai.com to www.marktai.com, and getting marktai.com to show up on Google. I'll be adding a ton of more cool stuff in the next couple of weeks.

This website is just the beginning of my many side projects to come. I'll be coding in most of my free time here at UCLA in between TBP and UPE. I'll be adding a post for every project that I do from now on, so check this website every now and again to get the latest update on what I'm doing!