Bear with me, there is some technical content in this post, I promise.
Chicago Blackhawks
Having won 3 Stanley Cups between 2009 and 2015 the Chicago Blackhawks have been going through a fallow period, only making the playoffs once in the last seven years – and they haven’t gone past round one since they won in 2015.
By the end of the 22/23 season Hawks’ icons Johnathan Toews and Patrick Kane had left and by the start of 23/24 the team was into a rebuild with the roster looking somewhat thin, despite picking up teenage phenom Connor Beddard 1st overall in the 2023 draft.
The Blackhawks had a tough 23/24 and had multiple injuries to cope with, including the loss of veteran NHLer Taylor Hall for most of the season. The exit of another veteran Cory Perry, following an off-ice incident didn’t help.
But there were things to cheer about. Bedard had some highlight reel moments, top scoring with 22 goals and 39 assists, despite missing 14 games with a broken jaw. He went on to win the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year. Newly acquired veteran Nick Foligno fitted right in and became a big influence in the dressing room and on the ice. Phillip Kurashev had a good season, forging a productive on-ice partnership with Bedard. Rookie Kevin Korchinski showed his defense chops and along with veteran Seth Jones & newly signed rookie Artyom Levshunov the Hawks goals against columns looks like it will improve. A number of younger players came up from the Rockford Icehogs towards the end of the season and Landon Slaggert & Frank Nazar both netted their first NHL goals. Finally, Petr Mrazek had a strong season between the pipes, returning a better than .90 save percentage.
The Blackhawks seem to have had a good 24/25 pre-season so far. 2nd overall 2023 draft pick, 6’ 2” Belorussian defenceman Artyom Levshunov, looks to be a good signing and a flurry of activity in July brought in a lot of veteran help.
So, it feels like an exciting time to be cheering for the Blackhawks as they look to climb back into playoff contention.
Techie bit…
I’ve built a small Chicago Blackhawks fan site and deployed it to AWS (yipee!).
I wanted to have a play with AWS Amplify and see what it was like, both technically and financially, I’ve also playing with Blazor WASM apps recently. As is my way, I wanted a proper project to work with rather than something artificial. So, go Hawks!
I’m treating it as a hobby, but I’m hoping to get some useful learning along the way. It’s very basic right now but I will build it out further before the start of the season.
Deploying it to AWS was simple enough to be honest. It took a bit of faffing to get the .Net SDK installed on the AWS build server (yml script below) but it didn’t stress me out too much…
version: 1
frontend:
phases:
preBuild:
commands:
- 'curl -sSL https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh -o dotnet-install.sh'
- 'chmod +x dotnet-install.sh'
- './dotnet-install.sh -Channel 8.0'
- 'export PATH=$PATH:/root/.dotnet'
build:
commands:
- 'dotnet publish -c Release -o release'
artifacts:
baseDirectory: release/wwwroot
files:
- '**/*'
- ../web.config
cache:
paths: []
The site has been up for 3 days and so far has cost me $0.28, all of which is for the builds. It currently runs on an AWS DNS hostname but I’ll add a vanity domain shortly. In the meantime here’s the URL.
https://main.d9078qui2pugg.amplifyapp.com/
I’ll write up my experiences, both with Blazor and AWS Amplify, here over the course of the next few weeks. I’m really interested to see how low friction building and maintaining a Blazor App is, and how easy Amplify remains as I start to build out backend services and add infrastructure.
Did I say “Go Hawks!”…