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
The Problem Nobody Warns You About The thing that caught me off guard wasn’t the query latency — it was the storage invoice. We had a working Elasticsearch cluster, decent relevance tuning, p95 query times under 200ms. Then we crossed 100M documents and the disk bill tripled inside of two billing cycles. Not doubled. Tripled. … Read more
Why I Built This (And Why You Should Too) I was three hours deep into a Docker networking debug session — containers couldn’t reach each other, docker network inspect was giving me nothing useful — and I had this uncomfortable realization: I was treating Docker like magic. I knew the commands. I had no idea … Read more
The Problem: 3D Tours Used to Require a $5,000 Camera and a Production Team The thing that surprised me most when I first tried shooting a 3D tour with my iPhone 13 Pro was how fast it worked. I expected garbage — blurry depth maps, misaligned stitching, the usual “consumer tech trying to be pro” … Read more
I Needed a Home Server OS and Couldn’t Stop Second-Guessing Myself The machine I was setting up wasn’t impressive — a decommissioned Dell OptiPlex 7050 with 16GB RAM, a 500GB NVMe I had lying around, and an old spinning disk I repurposed for media. The workload: Plex with hardware transcoding, Nextcloud for file sync, Pi-hole … Read more
The Situation That Made Me Build a Real Patching Workflow The Slack message came in at 6:47 AM on a Tuesday. CVE-2024-1086 — a use-after-free in the netfilter subsystem that gives local users a path to root. My servers were running kernel 6.1.x. None of them were patched. I had 40 production boxes spread across … Read more
Why I Started Looking Past Docker The licensing change hit us on a Thursday afternoon — Docker Inc. quietly updated their terms and suddenly Docker Desktop required a paid subscription for companies with more than 250 employees or $10M in revenue. We were squarely in that bracket. The per-seat cost wasn’t catastrophic, but it was … Read more
Why I Stopped Using Shared Runners (And What That Cost Me) The breaking point for me wasn’t gradual — it was a Monday morning deploy at 9:15 AM where the pipeline sat in “pending” for 47 minutes before a single job ran. Not failing. Not running. Just waiting in a queue behind every other team … Read more
The Situation Nobody Warns You About The gap that actually hurts isn’t the one after a patch drops — it’s the one before your distro ships it. A CVE gets published on NVD with a CVSS score of 9.8, the upstream kernel commit fixing it is already merged into Linus’s tree, security researchers start publishing … Read more
The Problem I Kept Running Into: Index Bloat at Scale The thing that broke my mental model first wasn’t slow queries — it was watching disk I/O climb to 95% utilization on NVMe drives while average query latency jumped from 12ms to 340ms on a corpus I’d carefully tuned for months. We were running Elasticsearch … Read more