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: 2026-07-11
Last week, we discussed the ultimate goal of having an RSS feed. To do this properly, we would need a blog database model and to this end, I migrated the application's database access layer from native SQL to the Object Relationship Model implementation SQL Alchemy w/ SQL Model.
That being said, one thing I've learned from experience is that sometimes it's best to cut straight to the chase and focus on the end goal. Doing so confers some of the benefits of the goal without so much work and can help guide future plans. It's not that I want to cut corners. I do want to implement a basic blog in the end.
So, given that it's easy enough to manually create an RSS feed, I've done exactly that. This blog can now be subscribed to via RSS!
It's nothing special: just an XML file meeting the RSS specification. Some RSS feeds include the entire article, and have all kinds of fancy tags and custom fields. Mine is barebones, partly because I don't know RSS very well and partly because simple is often better.
However, manually updating my RSS feed is pretty cumbersome, so next week I'll turn my attention back to the blog model so that the feed can be generated from it.
