Hey everyone so I wanted to write a quick update to let you know that a new site is on the way and I will be documenting the process of building it. While this blog served me ok as I got up and running, I’d like to present a more professional and practical version going forward.
The current version of this site was build with Gatsby for static rendering / linking, and used GitHub / Netlify as a CMS / backend. While this worked and was cheap, it’s a little clunky and outdated.
For our new site we’ll build the frontend using React and Next.js for the UI framework, Recoil and hooks for state management, Material UI as our base component library, msal.js to help us handle client side OAuth, Azure Functions / node.js for our backend api layer, MongoDB for our database, Azure Blob Storage for our image/file CDN, and Azure Static Web App Preview to host most of this.
And as I build the new site, I will document it all here so you can see it take shape.
One notable change is that unlike in my previous post where we used Azure Active Directory for both authentication, as well as authorization (i.e. both who a user is, and what they’re allowed to do), in the new architecture we will only use AD for authentication. Authorization will be handled by our application, which will leave us with more flexibility as well as a more secure site to boot.