After working on the project on and off for a few months I finally found enough time to finish the migration to F#, Suave and Docker of BuildStats.info.

The migration was essentially a complete rewrite in F# and a great exercise to learn F# and Suave.io as part of a small side project which runs in a production environment now. Working with F# and Suave was so much fun that I'm already planning to develop a couple more small projects in the very near future, but more on this at another time.

Apart from migrating to F# and Suave I had also dockerised the application and switched my hosting from an Azure Web App to Amazon EC2 Container Service, because it is considerably cheaper than Microsoft's ACS at the time of writing. I was also considering Docker Cloud and Google Container Service, but the fact that I can run a micro instance in Amazon for free for 12 months was the deciding factor which pushed me towards AWS and I am very happy so far.

Small side projects like this are always a great opportunity to try and learn new technologies beyond a simple hello world application and with that in mind I also decided to document the service endpoint with RAML, which is a very intuitive language for describing web service APIs. RAML was not entirely new to me, but it was the first time I used version 1.0 and some of its new features.

Last but not least I also switched my CI system from AppVeyor to TravisCI. I wasn't really planning to do this, but because I wanted to build the application with Mono on Linux I had to make that transition as well. Nevertheless I am still a big fan of AppVeyor and will continue using it as my primary CI sytem for all Windows based builds and Travis is just as great as well.

A lot of (good) things have been going on in my private life in the last 6 months and I didn't get as much time to blog and work on side projects as I wanted to do, but now that things have gotten a bit calmer again I hope to get more time to keep this blog more updated again and talk about all the stuff that I am doing every day.

Wish you all a great weekend and stay tuned :)