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Thoughts on programming, indie hacking, and everything in between.
Systemd in Production: Service Management Beyond the Basics
How I use systemd for production services — writing good unit files, managing services day-to-day, logging with journald, and hardening for security. Practical patterns from real deployments.
Temporal SDK Metrics: Prometheus Exporter vs OTLP for Multi-Worker Deployments
How to choose between Prometheus exporter and OTLP for Temporal SDK metrics, especially when running multiple worker instances on the same host. A practical guide with real configuration.
A PostgreSQL 17 Migration Postmortem: WAL Recycling, Silent Timeouts, and the False Economy of Conservative Configs
What I learned migrating tens of GB across two PostgreSQL nodes — WAL starvation breaking async replication, timeouts murdering index builds mid-restore, and how conservative configs ironically made everything worse. With a config cheat sheet and a pre-migration checklist you should not skip.
sed for Emergency Debugging: When vim and nano Are Not an Option
It was 11 PM. I was debugging self-hosted PostgreSQL HA setup and vim wasn't available in the container. This is the story of how sed became my go-to tool for quick fixes in production environments.
Automating Docker PostgreSQL Backups with Cron: Complete Guide (Part 3 of 3)
Part 3: Eliminate manual backups with automated cron jobs. Learn scheduling strategies, environment setup, monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, and complete working examples for production-grade PostgreSQL backup automation.
Restoring Docker PostgreSQL Safely: Zero Data-Loss Procedures (Part 2 of 3)
Part 2: Master PostgreSQL database restoration in Docker with safety-first procedures. Learn pre-restore checks, pg_restore techniques, automatic rollback, and emergency recovery to ensure zero data loss.
Docker PostgreSQL Backups: Production-Ready Strategy (Part 1 of 3)
Part 1: A comprehensive guide to backing up PostgreSQL databases in Docker containers. Covers container identification, database discovery, compression, checksums, manifests, and retention policies with production-ready scripts.
My Backup Strategy: Tar, Rsync, and Cron
How I automated daily, weekly, and monthly backups of my Code and Work directories to my Android phone via Termux.
Server-Sent Events: The Simple Alternative to WebSockets
Learn when to use SSE instead of WebSockets for one-way real-time streaming, with Node.js code examples
Secure User and Sudo Management on Production Ubuntu Servers
A step-by-step guide to creating new users, granting sudo privileges securely, and configuring passwordless sudo on a production Ubuntu server.
Production Linux Deployment Guide: Where to Put Your Files
A practical guide to file placement on production Linux servers following the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). Learn where to place applications, configs, logs, and data for consistent and maintainable deployments.
Docker Installation on Ubuntu Server: A Complete Guide
Step-by-step guide to manually installing Docker Engine on Ubuntu servers with Docker Compose, GPG key management, and user group configuration
Setting Up SMTP Email with Nodemailer in Next.js
Learn how to configure a contact form with Gmail's free SMTP service using Nodemailer in your Next.js application
SSH into Server with Tailscale
Learn how to securely SSH into your servers during CI/CD workflows using Tailscale