I've been doing DevOps

I've been working on the website lately, can you tell?

I freshened up the frontend because I knew I could do better than what it was previously. It's still a work in progress, so some things might move around or change color.

Single sign-on

There have been some notable changes on the backend. Earlier this year, I deployed a single sign-on (SSO) solution to my home lab environment, and I decided that this website should be one of the many services that will integrate the unified authentication flow. 

In terms of security, there are tradeoffs for consolidating your logins. It does technically become a single point of failure, but if you properly harden your SSO solution, then you'll experience net benefits. 

The flip side of being a single point of failure is that the attack surface is reduced; your user doesn't have several accounts to monitor and maintain, but just one. And you can harden this account by enabling two-factor authentication.

Testing and deployment automation

The other thing I did was set up a basic continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline using GitHub Actions.

As of writing this, my CI simply attempts a Docker image build, then (on success) triggers a deployment script by having GitHub's runners hit my webhook listener with a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) so that I can keep the redeployment control locked down.

Having your project redeploy automatically is just one of those magical things you can't help but appreciate as a developer.

That's the high level overview of the major changes I've made here. In the meanwhile, I'll be brainstorming more nifty features to add.