Learn about how "A Principal Engineer" was created using Swift!

Motivation

Now that I've been a Principal Engineer for a few years, I think it's time to try and share some details about how I got where I am. My hope is that others trying to become technical leaders can benefit from some of my lessons learned along the way. So I decided to make a blog. It seems to me that a "making of" post is as good a place to start as any.

Creating the blog code

My favorite programming language is Swift. Many people believe it's just for iOS development, but that is untrue. Swift is a fantastic multi-paradigm language that you can use to build virtually anything. If I had to describe myself as an engineer, I would probably say I'm a full-stack Swift developer.

John Sundell wrote Publish, which is an excellent static site generator for Swift. I previously used Publish to write my resume, so it was a natural choice when making the blog. It makes excellent use of Swift's generic system and result builders to create HTML.

I'm not a designer, so I needed a template. I found a wonderful free-to-use template called "Sparrow 1.0" and was well on my way. I have got to give the designers huge credit because it's one of the best templates I have ever used. The HTML came formatted, and the CSS was actually understandable. It was even written in such a way that it would not conflict with other CSS you already have. I did notice that it was only a "light mode" type template. I added several CSS media queries to support dark mode based on system settings and contributed that code back to the creators of "Sparrow 1.0".

Publishing the site

Publishing platforms were a little tricky. I wanted something free, or at least very cheap. I explored using GitHub pages and carefully read the terms. While I didn't see anything that indicated I couldn't use GitHub pages, it felt like a blog would go against the spirit of the feature. Instead, I found Netlify, which is perfect for hosting static websites.

CI/CD pipeline

I am a big believer in automation. Netlify does offer an option to just upload a folder and host it, but I simply cannot pass up the opportunity to push to the main branch and have my website deployed a few minutes later. Because Publish is pure Swift, it can run on Linux, which means I could use a swift docker container to generate my static site. I used GitHub actions as a CI/CD provider and a Netlify deploy plugin to publish the site.

Pagination

The last big hurdle was getting pagination working reasonably well with a static website. I took a look at some implementations of pagination in other static website generators, like Jekyll. Ultimately, I wrote a build plugin for Publish that did the trick. Here's a taste of the code that backs it.

extension APrincipalEngineer {
    static let BLOG_PAGE_SIZE = 10
}

extension Plugin where Site == APrincipalEngineer {
    static var generatePaginatedBlogPages: Self {
        Plugin(name: "Generated Paginated Blog Pages") { context in
            guard let blogSection = context.sections.first(where: { $0.id.rawValue == APrincipalEngineer.SectionID.blog.rawValue }) else {
                throw PublishingError(
                    infoMessage: "Unable to find blog section"
                )
            }
            let allItems = context.sections.flatMap { $0.items }
            let pages = allItems.chunks(ofCount: Site.BLOG_PAGE_SIZE).enumerated().map { (offset, _) -> Page in
                let index = offset + 1
                let blog = Blog(context: context, section: blogSection, pageSize: Site.BLOG_PAGE_SIZE, offset: Site.BLOG_PAGE_SIZE * offset)
                return Page(path: Path("pages/\(index)"), content: .init(title: "Blog - Page \(index)", description: "A Principal Engineer Blog - Page \(index)", body: .init(html: blog.html.render()), date: Date(), lastModified: Date(), imagePath: nil, audio: nil, video: nil))
            }

            pages.forEach {
                context.addPage($0)
            }
        }
    }
}

Tyler Thompson

Tyler Thompson is a Principal Engineer with over 15 years experience. He currently works as a Principal Software Development Engineer for Zillow Group. Before working at Zillow he was a Principal Software Engineer for World Wide Technology and worked across many different industries.