TechHub

HTTP/3 has been shipping in browsers for years now, and it's still frequently mischaracterized as "HTTP/2 over UDP." That description is close enough to be misl

The first time I ran a migration on a production database with a live application, I added a column with a default value. It locked the table for 90 seconds. Th

The first time someone explained operators to me, they said "it's a controller that manages a custom resource." That's accurate and useless. The second explanat

I built a service-to-service API in REST/JSON for years, and it worked fine, but there was always a class of bugs I could never quite eliminate. The Go service

I have a folder of CSV exports I use for ad-hoc analysis. Twenty files, a few gigabytes total, and for years I loaded them into pandas, hit memory limits, and r

I put off learning eBPF for two years because every introduction started with "it's a virtual machine in the kernel" and then got into verifier details. The men

For years, distributed tracing was a Datadog or New Relic feature, priced per host and locked to a vendor SDK. OpenTelemetry changed that. The instrumentation i

Nginx and Caddy both require you to write a config file listing every route. Traefik doesn't. It watches the Docker socket, reads container labels, and builds t

I built a home NAS on ext4 with mdadm RAID five years ago, and it worked right up until a disk failed, the rebuild hit an unreadable sector on another disk, and

I used rsync and tar for backups for years. They work, but every time I needed to restore something, I held my breath. Did the incremental sync catch everything

I built a transactional email system for a small SaaS two years ago. The emails went out. Some arrived. Some went to spam. Some disappeared entirely. I spent th

I used Docker for four years before I understood what it actually does. The mental model I had was "lightweight VM," which is wrong in every direction that matt

I've used Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud Drive at various points, and they all solve the same problem well. What they don't solve is syncing a 200GB folder o

I resisted jq for a year. The syntax looked like line noise, and I could always pipe into Python for anything complicated. Then I hit a debugging session where

Every project I've joined in the last five years has had a Makefile, and half of them were wrong. They were either a thin wrapper around npm run that added noth

A binary from a vendor fails on the production server and works on your laptop. There's no source, no logs, and no documentation. This is where strace earns its

I ran Pi-hole for a year before adding Unbound, and the difference isn't what I expected. It's not that ads suddenly stopped — Pi-hole handles those fine on it

I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 for Home Assistant, followed the official install guide, had it running in twenty minutes, and then spent three weekends getting it to

I spent a weekend building a WireGuard setup for my home lab. It worked, right up until my ISP rotated my public IP and I had to update the endpoint on every cl

The default postgresql.conf is tuned for a machine with 128 MB of RAM from 2004. Every production Postgres instance runs with settings that are wrong for its ha

Every team I've joined has had a different Git workflow, and every one of them had someone quietly rebasing pushed commits while everyone else pretended not to

Two Nginx features sit in the "everyone should use this, almost nobody does" category: proxy caching and rate limiting. Both are maybe ten lines of config. Both

Most uptime monitoring services charge per monitor. I have twelve things I want to check, and somewhere around the fourth monitor the pricing starts to feel abs

I ran OpenVPN on a cheap VPS for years. It worked, but connecting took fifteen seconds, and the config file was four hundred lines of certificate chains I never

I used to keep my dotfiles in a normal Git repo and symlink them into place with a shell script. It worked, but every new machine meant cloning, running the scr