This December, Netlify launched an incredibly fun and public-spirited project: Dusty Domains. It’s a bit of a trope that whenever anyone has an idea for a project, they immediately register a domain name for it. It makes sense in some ways. Coming up with a name for a project is hard. If I were to make a list of the three things I find most challenging about programming, naming things would be right at the top.
1. Naming things
3. Race conditions
2. Character encoding 🤬
4. Off-by-one errors
If I find a name I like and the domain is still available, of course I will want to register it before someone else does.
But many of these projects never get past the idea phase, and the registered domains collect virtual dust. Often we may not even think about them again, until of course we receive the annual domain renewal notification, a guilty reminder of our abandoned projects.
Dusty Domains is attempting to put these dormant domains to good use. For each domain dusted off and deployed to Netlify in December, Netlify will donate $50 to some fantastic charities. New Relic is matching Netlify’s pledge, along with a few other companies.
Together, these companies have pledged a total of $100,000. Instead of $50, the charities will now receive $500 per project deployed!
Getting started with Netlify
I am a major culprit of registering domain names for projects that I don’t complete or even start in some cases. For example, I have one domain which I’ve renewed every year since 2004. It’s supposed to be a promotional website for a book that I have not even begun to write! So, when I heard about Dusty Domains, I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to finally finish one of my projects and learn more about deploying to Netlify in the process.
I am already familiar with Git and different CI/CD pipelines, so making my first deployment on Netlify was reasonably straightforward. Their documentation is good, they have step-by-step tutorials on their blog, and they even have a selection of templates to help you get a jump start.
But, because Netlify is a serverless platform, adding instrumentation to the build and deployment process is more complex than usual. I wrote about serverless monitoring in Monitoring your AWS Lambda functions inside and out. With AWS Lambda, installation is much easier thanks to serverless-newrelic-lambda-layers, a plugin for Serverless.com. Unfortunately, no such plugin existed for New Relic and Netlify. So, I created one.
The New Relic Netlify plugin
