One of the things I like most about languages like GoLang is the fact you can create a small executable that holds all the files needed for a server, or any other application. Kotlin, and any other JVM based languages, however always seem to be rather bloated, Kotlin and Spring have often been over 100mb, and even Scala and Play Framework are of a similar size.

I’ve been using my old static site generator setup for years now, when I first started using DocPad it was fast, simple and had the ability to add plugins which made it immensely extensible. However since then development has died down and there have been some questions about how long the development will continue, my site has become more complex requiring a number of additional plugins, and the general performance of DocPad seems to have slowed down (mostly due to the additional plugins ect.)

Static sites are great, they allow you to build a website using nothing but client side tech, and let you host them easily in places like AWS S3, Github/Gitlab pages, or even on an arduino as they dont require any server side code. However they do have one big downside, user interaction.

Kotlin is a programming language developed by Jetbrains in 2011 as a JVM alternative to Java, it gained popularity amongst Android developers and in 2017 Google started officially supporting it as a first class language on Android. Until now I had only used it on Android but with the release of Spring 2.0, and the official support of Kotlin, I thought now would be a great time to try it out!

Recently I had to convert a manual jenkins build job into an automated job that will trigger each time a push gets made to the SCM server. For SCM I use git with the help of a git management tool called gitolite which allows you to setup and configure your git management from within a git repository, talk about meta.