Excited to bring my little over a year old art project, Scanning for Meaning, back to life today.

The project comes out of this cyberpunk dream of living with these pixel waterfalls. Putting this project on a large screen and just letting the colors wash over the room excites me. It’s also an experiments in the “web app” as an medium for artistic expression leveraging the frontend development I was doing at the time.

Enjoy.

Project: Scanning for Meaning
Site: scanning-for-meaning.travisshears.xyz
Repo: gitlab
Pics:

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Tech behind Scanning for Meaning

This project is divided up into two parts, a frontend react app and a backend node js server. Originally these two were broken up into separate folders of the repo with one deployed to aws s3 static site and the other to a node js docker image running in my old docker swarm. Since then I’ve gained a lot of development experience and devops knowledge so when it came time to revive the project I did some restructuring and simplification.

First I moved things around to just be a single app where the backend also serves the static html, js, and css files. This made HTTPS web socket and CORS much easier because the same backend that serves the files is listening for websocket connections. With this new docker image pushed to the repo’s gitlab docker image registry I got started with the devops tasks. Since my docker swarm evolved into a Traefik proxied Kubernetes cluster I had to create a few k8s resources, here. After that was just a manner of creating the subdomain in Digital Ocean then updating the Traefik config.

So far I’m really happy with my new k8s cluster and hope to continue to bring new and old projects to it. Feels like finally things have settled from my explorations in docker swarm and nomad. Also as much of the industry moves to k8s, including my office, the knowledge is just going to become more helpful.