When I was about nine, I saw the way-underrated movie "Explorers," starring a very young Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix (!) for the first time. The movie involves creating a spaceship out of a very hacked-together Apple computer and a Tilt-A-Whirl.
A year on from writing "Truth in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", much of what I had feared has come to pass. In fact, in many cases things are worse than I expected.
There's nothing a user interface designer loathes more than complexity. Every design—at least, every modern design—seeks to minimize clicks, icons, visual noise. What if instead of a button, we had a borderless icon? What if instead of navigation controls, we used gestures?
And what if—hear me out—instead of search results, we had language model-distilled text delivered to you, hot and fresh?
The objective of DevOps is simplicity. But with so many moving parts, getting the Rube Goldberg machine to run without a hitch is challenging even under the best circumstances. Recently, I had a need for a rapid deployment of a LetsEncrypt-enabled web service, and I was tired of doing, well, any manual steps. So I buckled down and figured out how to get an app deployed with a real domain and a real cert in a single move.
Here's how I got it done. Hopefully this process can be of use for you.