Bertha
Bertha was a small, sweet, Australian Cattle Dog. She enjoyed eating, fetching sticks and barking at visitors! She was born in May of 2010 and passed away in August of 2021. Bertha moved in with Dan in July of 2010, and lived most of her life in Snohomish.
Developers
Daniel Doran
drdoran@uw.edu
Dan is Bertha's owner. He wanted to build the site so that he could practice web programming in his free time. This is his opportunity to share his dog with the world.
Started development on 04/26/2017 and on 04/10/2022 converted the site to static HTML assets. That's a wrap!
Mikayla Monroe
mikaylabear3@msn.com
Outside of everythingbertha.com, Mikayla enjoys running, reading, traveling, friends, family, animals, learning Arabic, and anything outdoorsy or athletic, especially on the water and in warm weather.
She is an alumnus of the Ocean Research College Academy (Cohort 11), where she did research on heavy metal concentrations in the Puget Sound, river otter fur, and human hair. She presented her findings at 8 different national and international conferences.
Started development on 04/26/2017 and stopped working on 08/11/2018.
History
Struggling to decide on a site to design for her Dynamic Web Pages computer science class, Mikayla was baited to create a site for Danny's dog, Bertha. This project and further web development classes introduced both Mikayla and Danny to web languages such as CSS, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, and database queries via SQL statements. Danny was intrigued to continue Mikayla's class project beyond the class. eBert started as an amateur class project in May of 2017 and has gone through several stages of development. Everything since has been headed by Danny, including the addition of blog posts and the recent Summer 2018 complete website overhaul.
Check out the OG Site here: http://og.everythingbertha.com
Machines
Pike
The site was originally hosted on a Raspberry Pi named "pike" with a full LAMP stack, featuring Arch Linux ARM, the Apache web server, MariaDB and PHP. Custom systemd scripts were written to count visitors, update the DNS, and create visitor count graphs using gnuplot.
The everythingbertha.com domain was acquired in May of 2017. Pike honorably served webpages from April 2017 to May 2018.
Paq
Paq is an old PC from Dan's uncle.
Creek
After starting work as a Software Engineer at Amazon, Dan came into some money and decided to splurge on his server infrastructure. He purchased a realized rack server (though he had no rack to hold it)! The make/model was a Dell PowerEdge R710.
The new server had several fans, and when it ran, it sounded like a creek, hence the name.
Covid
Creek was a great machine and a hell of a lot of fun to own, but it just wasn't practical to own a rack server while apartment surfing. Dan decided to downsize to a respectable tower server, a Dell PowerEdge T110 II.
This was around February of 2020, which is a notable period of time because it is when the Coronavirus pandemic started leading to stay-at-home orders in the US. This influence led to the name Covid.
Frameworks
V1: Scratch May 2017 to July 2018
The original website (og.everythingbertha.com) was completely handwritten in HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. This was a good opportunity for both Mikayla and Dan to practice with the basics of website building. The handwritten site included photo galleries, google maps integration, visitor counts and eventually a blog.
V2: Laravel July 2018 to November 2018
The site went through a major overhaul in the summer of 2018. All previous code was tossed away, and a web framework for PHP called Laravel was adopted. Laravel introduced a lot of architecture and development perks, such as a proper MVC and ORM. Ultimately, development with this framework ended because Dan realized that he really didn't like programming in PHP.
V3: ASP.NET Core November 2018 to April 2022
The site is currently built on ASP.NET Core. Dan became familiar with this framework during an internship in 2018, and developed respect and favor for it. Unlike ASP.NET Framework, ASP.NET Core is multiplatform and can run on the existing Arch Linux box. It hurt Dan a little to use a Microsoft Technology on the otherwise very non-Microsoft Everything Bertha. However, Dan realized that he really enjoys programming in C#, and that sometimes you've got to drink the KoolAid.
When he began looking for a new web framework, Dan originally leaned toward Node.js. This would mean that both client and server code are in the same language, and would also let Dan gain experience with this popular technology.
V4: Static HTML Assets April 2022 to present
For several years, the site was containerized with a LAMP image (for the OG site) and an ASP.NET image (for the current site). It was fun to play around with docker and set up the various connections between containers.
In December of 2021, a vulnerability in the log4j software library became widely known. This vulnerability actually existed for about a decade, and allowed the remote execution of code on the victim process.
Dan remembers the wild Friday at Amazon when nearly every service had to be rebuilt and the entire build system was toppled. Dan also remembers how he thought it would be funny if the outdated Apache image he used for running the OG version of his dog's website was targeted. Well in March of 2022, Dan and his roommate noticed a decrease in the quality of internet service at their apartment. This continued all day, and Dan joked about his vulnerable host. Then the fright kicked in. Dan had to test it. He issued a poweroff command to the server. To his dismay, there was an immediate improvement to the internet service at the apartment.
Ebert had been hacked and was likely mining crypto. Fortunatley, the vulnerable process was containerized and did not have access to other parts of the server.
To simplify the maintenance of the site, Dan converted all webpages to static HTML asssets.
