I have a couple of nascent projects on my plate which require custom, server-side software. I’ve been trying to use these projects to explore the Clean Architecture concepts using Test-Driven Development (TDD).
I can’t even begin.
According to Clean Architecture
, I should start with my application logic independent of whether it will be a command-line tool, a series of tools, a web-application, or what-have-you. So, let me start on the application code.
This is TDD though. So, I need to start with a test. How do I do that?
(nst:def-test-group querying-data () ...)
Wait a minute? I just committed myself to Lisp. I just made a huge business decision, a huge implementation decision, a decision that will shape my life for the next n years, and neither TDD or Clean Architecture had anything to say.
I need building supplies. I can’t go anywhere with my architecture or my development without a programming language.
I want to write my apps in Lisp. One of them, I already have mostly done in Lisp. I am still trepidatious about deploying Lisp.
Why am I trepidatious about deploying Lisp? Is it because there is inadequate support for web programming in Lisp? Absolutely not. Is it because I have some doubt in Lisp’s staying power? Absolutely not.
It’s email. Email is holding me back.
I use my current web hosting provider to give me a LAMP stack upon which I run WordPress for this blog and some git repositories and a bug-tracking database (that I can’t remember how to log into). All of that, I could move with confidence in a few hours.
What I dread is having to collect the several hundred mail-forwards that I currently have along with the half-dozen IMAP accounts and move them anywhere, let alone to somewhere that I have to manage them myself and deal with SPAM and mail queues and crap.
It seems that for only a few bucks more per month than I’m paying now, I can get Plesk on a VPS that should be big enough for my purposes. Does anyone have any experience with Plesk? Is it going to make email painless for me on Ubuntu? Or, am I going to hate my life? Does someone have a VPS provider they strongly recommend?
Do I really have to write my application in PHP on the chance that I’ll want to deploy it on the web just because email is scary?
I would recommend you move your email to Fastmail.fm. You totally should get out of the business of running an email server yourself.
My current configuration looks like it would cost me $165/yr on fastmail and be impossible on gmail-for-business.