Infrastructure, deployments, automation.
Your app writes to /var/log/app.log. The disk fills up. You write a quick logrotate config, copy-paste from the first Stack Overflow result, set up a daily rotate. Two months later the disk is fine but you discover the app …
You SSH into your server and run the same five commands every Sunday morning: df -h, free -h, systemctl --failed, apt list --upgradable, lastb. Five minutes of looking around to confirm nothing’s quietly broken. Multiply …
Pocket announced its shutdown in 2025. Instapaper still exists but is third-handed and feels frozen. Reader-by-Readwise is good but it’s a $10/month subscription. The self-hosted answer is Wallabag — PHP+MySQL, runs on a $5 VPS, has clean iOS / Android …
You want to share a thing on your home server with someone outside your house. Maybe you wrote a small status page, or you want a friend to grab a file, or you’re showing a client a Caddy-served Astro preview. …
You write a script. You run it from your shell — it works perfectly. You add it to crontab to run hourly — it silently fails. The script’s still there, the cron’s firing on schedule, but the actual command is …
You set up a cron job. It runs nightly at 3 AM. Some nights it succeeds; some nights it doesn’t — but you never know which because cron’s only feedback is supposed to be email, and email-from-cron has been silently …
Your VPS is down. You don’t know it yet because nobody’s pinged you. The customer who emailed at 3 AM gets the “our server is unavailable” auto-responder, but it’s actually a real outage. By the time you wake up and …
RSS isn’t dead — it’s the part of the open web that the algorithm-driven feeds couldn’t kill. The trade is that you have to host the reader yourself if you want the experience to be good. Two reasonable self-hosted options …
You’ve spent enough years watching iCloud quietly rewrite your contact data, randomly de-syncing one device, “merging” the same family member into three different cards. The fix is leaving iCloud and running your own CalDAV/CardDAV server. Apple’s Calendar and Contacts apps …