Building GoGreen 2/n

Last posted at 2020-12-13 11:35 SGT

I was not playing coy when I refuse to talk about what GoGreen is in my previous post.

I'm just not confident it can be done. A key part of the value proposition involves certain engineering efforts between DigitalOcean and Docker not well documented on the Internet.

I reached out to DigitalOcean support and even offering to pay for paid support to expedite my fact-finding requests.

Turns out DigitalOcean doesn't do paid support. But surprisingly, they got back to me via email pretty quickly (less than 5 hours after I asked) and offered me a suggestion (in significant detail).

I'm impressed with that level of support. I'm comparing it against my experiences using paid support for AWS. And DigitalOcean at this point is outdoing even the supposedly customer-centric Amazon.

Anyway, back to the updates.

What I tried today

Typically, when you ask any support questions to any cloud or platform provider, the first email response tends to give you links to the existing documentation. Then it takes about 3-5 emails stretched over possibly weeks before they realize the question you ask is indeed pretty unique.

This happened to me once this year with AWS. In fact, I even managed to point out errors in their own documentation.

This time, DigitalOcean responded to my initial "Nope, I have read that before and that is not what I want. What I want is to do XYZ. And there's no documentation that covers that exactly." response within 2 hours. And the response was highly competent from a senior engineer in DigitalOcean called "Nate".

Now I don't expect it to be perfect and therefore, I met my first roadblock after trying out the method from Nate.

Which brings us to today's Blockers and Papercuts

Blockers and Papercuts

For the first-time reader, this is a quick recap of the 4 categories of obstacles

• 🛑 Absolute Blocker: I cannot get past this (yet?) and it's critical to building the app
• 🚧 Critical Slowdown: I took more than 10 mins to figure this out and it's critical to building the app
• 🦟 Annoying Mosquito: Took more than 10 mins or unsolvable but not critical
• 🧘🏻‍♂️ Zen: Solved in less than 10 mins and not critical

🧘🏻‍♂️ Zen

Not any today.

🦟 Annoying Mosquito

• Editing the title of a DEV post after it's been published appears to be impossible.

Action taken: Accept and move on. 🤷🏻‍♂️

🚧 Critical Slowdown

Not any today.

🛑 Absolute Blocker

So my blocker from taking the next step is this:

After I tried Nate's method and attempted a deploy, I got a deploy error. Not sure what that means, hence I fired a response to Nate and now praying for an answer.

As you can tell from the name of the log, yes, I'm attempting to do something involving Django for my DigitalOcean App Platform (DOAP) hackathon.

Time spent thus far 🕒

✨ New section!

Given most of us are busy with day jobs or schools, taking on a side project such as this hackathon may lead to unrealistic expectations. So, I felt it would be good to share if we can all share the actual time we spent. Of course, I have to lead by example.

After all, if there's anything 2020 has taught me, it's that compassion towards my own self is important. So here goes:

Overall time spent thus far: 4.5 hrs

1. Trying out how to deploy from GitHub to DOAP and other engineering stuff (1.5 hrs)
2. Writing on DEV and figuring out how to write in DEV (2 hrs)
3. Trying out Nate suggestion involving Docker and Django on DOAP (0.5 hrs)
4. Writing second post on DEV (0.5 hrs)

Conclusion

Let's hope Nate or any of his colleagues in DO get back to me with a permanent solution in the next 24 hrs. Fingers crossed! 🤞