★ FEATURED ★ Been diving deep into Ansible lately. Wrote my first playbook that sets up an entire LEMP stack from scratch — Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL, the works. No more SSHing into servers and running commands manually like it's 2010. Here's what I learned and the gotchas I ran into along the way...
Everyone keeps telling me PHP is dead. Meanwhile I'm here building high-performance APIs with PHP 8.3 and its JIT compiler, using Fibers for async operations, and deploying to production with zero downtime...
As someone who just started with AWS after years of managed hosting, the learning curve is real. Here's my no-nonsense guide to launching your first EC2 instance with proper security groups, key pairs, and not accidentally leaving port 22 open to the world...
Had to process a 2GB CSV file the other day. My first instinct was to read the whole thing into memory. Bad idea. Enter Node.js Streams — the feature that's been there since v0.10 and most people still don't use properly...
Laravel makes building APIs a breeze, but there are patterns and pitfalls that docs don't always cover. After building APIs in production for years, here's what actually works and what you should avoid...
Tired of "it works on my machine"? Let me show you how I set up Docker with Nginx reverse proxy for local development that mirrors production. Complete with SSL, multiple sites, and hot reload...
Middleware is the backbone of Express apps, but most tutorials only scratch the surface. Here are advanced patterns for error handling, authentication chains, rate limiting, and request validation that I use in production...
Need to resize images, generate thumbnails, or process files as they're uploaded? S3 event notifications + Lambda is the serverless combo that handles this beautifully. Here's how I set it up...
After nearly a decade writing code professionally, here are the lessons that no tutorial or bootcamp teaches you. From dealing with legacy codebases to knowing when NOT to refactor...