Guides, architectural notes, and case studies from building production web systems.
A relay type AVR quietly welded itself into permanent overvoltage after days of undervoltage from the power provider, and I almost didn't catch it in time.
How getting a Bluetti Elite 30 V2 let me replace a fragile internet-outage-based UPS script setup with a simpler one that pings a local CCTV camera to detect real power outages.
Felt sick today (thanks, spoiled milk), couldn't game because work can see my history, so I bought a brand new Bluetti power station to back up my homelab UPS.
Development was the easy part. The real lessons came from migrations, seeders, permission errors, and a Faker dependency that wasn't supposed to be in production.
Digging into what router I actually own, weighing a WiFi-capable MikroTik against leaning into gigabit, and seriously considering ditching it all for a mini PC running OPNsense.
A complete journey from cloud hosting to a full self-hosted homelab setup using a Dell OptiPlex Micro. Overcoming CGNAT limitations, building a hybrid VPS-Tailscale solution, and eventually achieving pure self-hosting with MikroTik DDNS, with real costs and technical solutions for hosting multiple websites and gaming servers.
Hairpin NAT on MikroTik is unreliable due to fasttrack. Here's how to solve it properly using AdGuard Home as a local DNS server with split DNS rewrites.
My self-hosted server handles everything it always has, but this blog's images needed a different fix. Here's why I picked Cloudflare R2 over AWS S3 in October 2025 for hosting blog post images, and what it would actually take for me to pay for S3 and EC2 instead.
Building a self-hosted media library with Immich and Unraid, ditching cloud storage subscriptions for total control over 4TB of videos and photos.
How I built a Discord bot powered by the Claude API and n8n on my homelab — and the docker compose mistake that wiped it out and taught me a hard lesson about backups.