As all parents can attest, when you have children certain things in life become somewhat more…difficult.
Things you used to take for granted - spare time, agency, sleep etc. - become scarce commodities. Contributing to OSS, working on interesting side-projects, or even writing a blog post, all become things you have to make time for.
But adding a web front-end to Runson.cloud was an idea which had been bubbling away in the back of my mind for a while. So I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and get on with it.
It took literally months.
Runson.cloud is a service which, given a web address, will attempt to lookup the public cloud that address is hosted on.
It parses the lists of public IP addresses which the big cloud providers publish, and uses them to determine which provider, if any, a given IP address belongs to.
I’d love to say its been incredibly useful, and has helped solve countless problems. But in truth its a bit of a novelty. There are grandiose plans to one day record historic data, and plot the movement of sites between clouds over time etc. etc. Right now though, it’s just a bit of fun.
A secondary reason for building a front-end was that I’d just completed Josh W Comeau’s CSS for JavaScript Developers course, and was keen to put my new-found CSS skills to the test.
As a brief aside, I can’t recommend Josh’s course highly enough. Previously, my approach to CSS was very much SODD (Stack Overflow Driven Development), and I’d never really taken the time to learn the fundamentals. The thing with CSS is that the right way to do things has changed a lot over time, and there’s a lot of outdated information out there, which I often just guilelessly followed.
Josh’s course is a great introduction to the core concepts, and I found it really enjoyable.
Anyway, please check out Runson.cloud and let me know what you think!
