Hello, I'm Russ, and this is my website. I'm a software engineer who programs for the love of the craft in an age of tech disillusionment. The purpose of this site is to give me a place to publish my thoughts in general and on programming, personal projects, and professional developments.
Publish Date: 2026-07-04
With the web counter work last month, my blog graduated from a static HTML site into a jinja2 template-based site. I'd now like to go a little further and display articles from a database. For now, I'll continue to display the articles all on the index page, but my ultimate goal is to have a more fully-featured blogging platform, including an RSS feed.
Why an RSS feed? For one, an RSS feed would help make the blog more visible to search engine crawlers, raising traffic. I'll be honest: nobody reads this blog, it's new and mostly unoriginal. I make it for myself, and I don't need people to read it in order to continue publishing. That being said, attention is nice. Maybe one day I'll publish content that people are hungry to read?
Also, I've never worked with RSS before and it would be great to learn it. That's why I'm here, after all.
"Remember that all is opinion." - Marcus Aurelius
One other thing that would be nice is to pick up an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) library for my database model. These are controversial in the programming community, with many arguing that simple SQL is adequate for most cases and that ORM gains are questionable. Myself, I find ORMs lovely to work with:
Some care is needed to avoid N+1 problems, but otherwise, ORMs are great IMO.
Anyhow, the counter logic has now been ported to an ORM. I'm using SQLAlchemy with SQLModel on top for interoperability with Pydantic. My next goal will be building out a blog model. Stay tuned for that next week.