Systems design, servers, and production engineering.
13 posts
How I turned a single MacBook into a private cloud — AI inference, media server, dev services, wildcard HTTPS — all managed as code across 19 Docker Compose profiles.
How a bulk marketing campaign starved transactional email at Prachyam Studios — and how I fixed it by understanding Postfix queue internals and building a priority queue on top of Mailcow.
How Postfix queues work, why they pile up, and the exact commands to drain, inspect, and recover them when things go sideways.
How file system event APIs differ between Linux and macOS, and why it matters for cross-platform tooling.
The full story of building a self-hosted email stack across 12 domains and 6 servers at Prachyam Studios — the architecture, the hard lessons, and why I'd do it again.
How Nextcloud handles large file uploads under the hood, and how to implement chunked uploads manually when the desktop client isn't an option.
One changed line in a Dockerfile invalidates every layer after it. Ordering your Dockerfile with this in mind cuts rebuild times dramatically.
Passing SPF and DKIM doesn't mean DMARC passes. Alignment is a separate check — and missing it is why your authenticated emails still land in spam.
Self-hosting is not about being cheap or contrarian. It's about understanding your stack, owning your data, and building a certain kind of engineering judgment that you can't get any other way.
How to use Docker multi-stage builds to go from a 2GB Rust build image to a 12MB production image.
The difference between PgBouncer's pooling modes, why transaction mode breaks prepared statements, and which to use for Next.js apps.
Without keepalive on Nginx upstream blocks, every proxied request opens a new TCP connection to your backend. One directive fixes this.
Running a self-hosted email server across 12 domains for a media company — the architecture, challenges, and why I'd do it again.
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