My name is David Dyess II and this is my playground.

I'm married, to my beautiful wife Stanzi, since 2006, and have 3 kids - Raionna, Trey, Astrid. We currently live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We only knew each other about a month when we got married.

I am a web developer at All the Flavors, LLC, since 2021.

I served 20 years in the United States Air Force as a 2W2x1, from 2002 to 2022. It was a great career and I got to do and see things I'd never been able to otherwise. I held many different positions, culminating in Weapons Safety Manager when I retired.

I have been doing software development since high school and I have been involved in open source software since around 2000. I have contributed, in some form, to open source projects (some of which are no longer active) such as PostNuke, Xaraya, XOOPS, Drupal, Word Press, Debian, LaxerOS, openSUSE, plus various others and several of my own.

My first web site was tangant.com, which I launched in 1999 as a personal blog, it then became one of the first tutorial web sites for Windows XP, then a community blog. I later changed the domain name to daviddyess.com and no longer own the tangant domain name. I have several other web sites as well.

I grew up in Leeds, Alabama and graduated from Moody High School. I also met Stanzi in Leeds, while on leave.

About this Web Site

Early Days

Most of my involvement in open source has somehow centered around this or one of my other web sites. This web site started out using a simple static HTML web site, which grew into a very complicated HTML site. I discovered PHPNuke around 2000, started using that, then I discovered PostNuke and switched to it. I'm having trouble remembering exact years, but I do know around September 2002 I released a new blocks module for PostNuke named Nuclei. I then joined the USAF in October and while I was in basic training/technical school, my blocks module had spawned a new theme system for PostNuke.

Xaraya

By the time I was settled into my first duty station in the Air Force, PostNuke had split into 3 different projects, some say partially because of Nuclei. Ironically, I never finished Nuclei, it was very young when I had to leave for the Air Force and it was just a tiny slither of what I had planned to do. Also ironically, I left PostNuke and joined a majority of the core developers on the new Xaraya project. I wasn't sure which project would succeed, so I looked for another project to also contribute to. I worked on and contributed to WordPress, while running it here most of 2003. A friend of mine wanted a church web site and I thought it was more suitable to push new features into Xaraya, so we built marchtozion.com with Xaraya. This site was migrated to Xaraya at the end of 2003, as I viewed it as far more superior than WordPress (still would be today too). This site ran Xaraya until around 2008, when I created my own Clay framework and Clay CMS.

Clay

Clay was basically Xaraya Lite, with a few new concepts. The code still exists, but it doesn't run on the current version of PHP and I haven't even looked at it in years. It had a complete theme and template system, multi-role user groups, with multiple layers of privilege inheritance, multi-site and multiple simultaneous database support and, most importantly, it split the old PostNuke/Xaraya module system into modules, applications, components, actions, hooks, and plugins.

When I started building Clay, I had a lot of different web site ideas and I needed something that could run them all, even from a single copy of Clay. Clay could do that. I built up Clay very quickly, but I had a lot of delays after that. Unfortunately, I became very busy with my job in the Air Force around 2010 and then I was moved to Europe in 2013. This web site was just used and not really maintained (on a code level) for several years. It worked for a while though. Around 2016, I moved back to the US and began developing with Node.js. I had pretty much given up on further developing Clay at this point and eventually just installed WordPress again to use here.

WordPress

I've been building a lot of projects that have basically just been research exercises. I'd been wanting to replace WordPress again, but a lot of node.js projects are mostly single-purpose, they aren't really the old-fashioned CMS we used to have. I decided it was time for node.js to have a full-featured CMS, not some kind of cloud-based money pit. I use ArangoDB almost exclusively for my personal projects, so I initially created a CMS named Favor that uses ArangoDB for the database. Unfortunately, ArangoDB isn't all that well-known and not a lot of people have experience hosting it. Managed hosting for it can also be expensive and I decided I preferred the theme system I had built in another project. I moved Favor into the research category and started fresh again with Grazie!.

Grazie!

Grazie! is the first non-PHP application I've used here, since the days of plain HTML. I started building Grazie! in January 2024, had some disruptions that prevented me from launching it in March and April, and finally launched a really rough alpha version here on 12 May 2024. On 22 May, I was doing an upgrade and accidentally wiped my database, so I guess I relaunched on 22 May 2024 as well, haha. I was tired and it was a dumb mistake, but it opened my eyes to what others may have issues with, so maybe it'll help someone in the future.

Some key features of Grazie:

• Open Source and easily installable, without the need of forks or project templates

• Designed to be affordable to host - very low server requirements

• No extra setup - set environment variables, install, build, and run like any other Remix application

• Remix Server-side Rendered

• Mantine UI

• Prisma ORM and Migrations

• SQLite database

  • experimental PostgreSQL support

  • no external database required

• Themes

• Fine-grained permissions and Role-based access control

• User and Admin Dashboards

• Data Caching - per visit data can be dynamic and not impact server availability