I have been running nginx as a reverse proxy for years. Every new server, every new project, same setup. It took me way too long to stop overcomplicating it. Here is the exact configuration I use now, stripped down to what actually matters. The Minimal Config Every reverse proxy needs
I've been running this blog on Linode for over a year. It costs me $5/month and I have full control over everything. Here is how I set it up. Why Linode I looked at DigitalOcean, AWS, Hetzner. Linode ( now Akamai ) gives you a $100 credit for the
I have been running PostgreSQL migrations by hand for years and it was fine, until it wasn't. One missed ALTER TABLE on production and suddenly your app is throwing 500s at 2am. Here is how I do it now, properly. Why Migrations Matter If you are still running
I spend way too much time typing long docker commands. Every time I need to rebuild a container, I end up scrolling through my bash history trying to find that one command with the right flags. Last week I got tired of it and decided to move all my docker
Every side project I've ever shipped has a Makefile. Not because I'm nostalgic or some kind of Unix purist — because after ten years of trying every alternative, Make is still the one that works without surprising me. I've used npm scripts, rake, just, task,
I've spent the better part of a decade staring at broken code, confused logs, and systems that worked yesterday but don't today. After a while, you stop throwing darts and start developing actual mental models — patterns of thinking that consistently get you closer to the bug.
For years, my relationship with regular expressions went something like this: encounter a regex I needed, Google it, copy it from Stack Overflow, test it once, and move on. If it broke, I'd Google a new one. I treated regex like incantations — mysterious symbols that somehow worked, as
I wrote a post back in 2017 about updating SSH to version 7.5p1. Seven years and countless servers later, SSH is still the tool I use more than anything else — and I've learned a lot of tricks that save me time every single day. Most of them
I have a problem. Every time I come back from shooting — whether it's the coast at La Paloma, the streets of Montevideo, or drone footage over the countryside — I end up with hundreds of photos across two cameras and an SD card that desperately needs formatting. For years,
I set up my first Ghost blog in 2016, on a VPS I'd barely configured, with an SSL certificate I'd manually generated using Let's Encrypt DNS validation. It was janky, it broke constantly, and I loved it. Eight years and one CVE-induced admin key