ericwoo_kr The Moment I Started Taking Kernel CVEs Seriously The thing that woke me up wasn’t a breach. It was doing a post-incident audit and realizing our production API server had been running a 6-month-old kernel with three unfixed privilege escalation CVEs — two of which had public PoC exploits on GitHub. We hadn’t been hit. … Read more
The Gap Between ‘Kernel Patched’ and ‘Your Server Is Safe’ The thing that caught me off guard the first time I seriously tracked a kernel CVE was realizing I had no idea what “patched” actually meant. I’d see a CVE entry marked as resolved, open a terminal on my Ubuntu 22.04 box, run uname -r, … Read more
The Real Problem With Recorded Tests The checkout flow test passes on your machine, passes in your demo to the team, and then fails at 3am in CI every single day for two weeks. You dig into the logs and find a different failure mode each time — sometimes it’s a missing element, sometimes a … Read more
The Moment I Realized I Was the Problem The bottleneck was me. Not my tech stack, not my contractors, not the fact that we were pre-Series A with a skeleton crew. Every single slowdown in the product traced back to one person: me sitting on something. A PR would go stale because I hadn’t reviewed … Read more
I Needed a Private Sync Network for My Journals — So I Tried Both The thing that broke my patience with raw WireGuard wasn’t the first node or even the third — it was adding a VPS to a mesh that already had my home server and laptop talking to each other. Suddenly I’m juggling … Read more
I Needed a Home Server OS and Couldn’t Stop Second-Guessing Myself The thing that sent me down this rabbit hole wasn’t a technical problem — it was a Reddit thread where someone asked “Ubuntu or Fedora for a home server?” and every single reply was “just use Ubuntu.” No explanation. No trade-offs. Just vibes. I’d … Read more
The Error That Wastes Half Your Afternoon The worst CI failure mode isn’t a red build — it’s a build that looks like it never existed. You push a tag like v2.4.1, watch the CircleCI dashboard for a few seconds, and see… nothing. Not a failed pipeline. Not a warning. Just the tag sitting there, … Read more
The Problem That Sent Me Down This Rabbit Hole The thing that caught me off guard was how silent the failure was. My Lambda function was trying to connect to an MSK cluster, the connection timed out, and the only thing in CloudWatch was org.apache.kafka.common.errors.SaslAuthenticationException: Authentication failed. No principal name. No hint about which credential … Read more
I Needed Reliable Transactional Email — So I Tried All Three Password reset emails were landing in Gmail’s spam folder. Not occasionally — consistently. My small SaaS app had maybe 200 active users at the time, and I was getting support tickets every week from people who never got their confirmation emails. The culprit was … Read more
The Problem That Made Me Actually Care About Storage Engines The thing that broke my comfortable ignorance about storage engines was a pipeline ingesting sensor telemetry — about 50,000 inserts per second into a PostgreSQL 15 cluster. The hardware wasn’t cheap: NVMe drives, 32 cores, 128GB RAM. Didn’t matter. Around 40k inserts/sec, write latency would … Read more