I have hit a block. Not a writing block, not per-se. More of a mental staircase of ascending excuses. I just can’t make things anymore for myself.

There was recently a discussion on Hacker News around application logging on a budget. At work I’ve been trying to keep things lean, not to the point of absurdity, but also not using a $100 or $1000/month setup, when a $10 one will suffice for now. We settled on a homegrown Clickhouse + PHP solution that has performed admirably for two years now. Like everything, this is all about tradeoffs, so here’s a top-level breakdown of how Clog (Clickhouse + Log) works.

Five years ago I wrote about how I structured applications. A lot has changed in five years. An old saying states you should be able to look back on your work of yesterday and wonder what you were thinking. So here is how I structure apps in 2020, what’s changed and what’s stayed the same.

Nowadays I take it for granted that everything is in git. Even my Uni dissertation was stored in a git repo. But this is a story of the first time I was exposed to source control, back when SVN was the top dog, and someone had a genius idea of how to set it up on a server. Continue reading »

My “business” site, as in the place I don’t ramble on about code and movies and the world, has been a bit neglected recently. I say recently, but the last update was at the start of this decade and since then it has received nery a touch. Continue reading »

Ten years ago I decided to take a domain I had registered the year before and put it to good use. I replaced my homebrew CMS (the second version) and replaced it with the freshly released WordPress 2.0 along with a new design. Continue reading »

A few years ago I had a problem. An API, consuming a dozen microservices, needed to scale and not just by an order of magnitude or two. It needed to handle a load far greater than it was originally intended for. How to do it? Continue reading »