A slow blog about backend engineering, self-hosting, and the small decisions that make software either pleasant or miserable to maintain.
For years I ran a tangle of nginx configs, one per project, each slightly
different because I copy-pasted them at 1am. Consolidating everything behind a
single Caddyfile cut my config from 400 lines to 40, and TLS just
— stopped being something I thought about. Here's the layout that finally
stuck, and the two gotchas that cost me an evening each.
Most side projects and internal tools never see enough traffic to justify the operational cost of a managed database. A flat JSON file, committed to git, will outlive three rewrites of your "proper" schema. A case for boring storage.
Documentation debt compounds quietly. I went back through every repo I've owned since 2020 and rewrote the top of each README as if I were the on-call engineer with zero context. Here's what I learned about my own writing habits.
My home lab used to fall over every time the power flickered. After switching to a small UPS, staggered boot order, and a health-check cron job that texts me, it's been quietly running for eight months without a single manual restart.