Welcome to my tech blog. I write about Kubernetes, self-hosting, home labs, and cloud infrastructure.
All articles on this site are AI-generated, but they are 100% based on my real-world experience building and running these systems.
Go's Developer Experience Problem: Why Spring Boot Still Wins for Business Applications
Go is a fine language for infrastructure tooling. But for the 90% of software that is business applications, Spring Boot’s developer experience is dramatically superior – and AI-assisted development has eliminated the last argument against Java’s annotation-driven model.
Building a Self-Hosted Photo Gallery on Kubernetes with Immich, Authentik, and Cloudflare Tunnel
How I built a Google Photos alternative running on a 3-node Kubernetes cluster at home, protected by MFA authentication, and exposed securely via Cloudflare Tunnel with zero open ports.
The Identity Provider Customization Cliff: When OAuth2 Is Overkill and SaaS IDPs Aren't Enough
The identity industry is stuck between SaaS IDPs that aren’t flexible enough and custom solutions that aren’t secure enough. And for a surprising number of applications, the entire OAuth2 token ceremony is overkill – a session cookie would do.
Overengineering Microservices: When Smart Decisions Compound Into Complexity
HAProxy sidecars for mTLS. Hystrix for circuit breaking. Apache Camel between layers within the same service. Six API versions. A mandated common framework. A squash merge ban. Each decision was defensible. Combined, they created a system that took three months to onboard into.
Stop Returning 200 OK for Everything
HTTP status codes are a contract consumed by clients, load balancers, monitoring, and caches. When you return 200 OK for partial failures, every one of these systems is blind.
Hybris OCC: A REST Facade Over a Stateful Monolith
SAP Commerce OCC promises a stateless REST API for headless commerce. Underneath, every request hydrates an HTTP session and routes through the same stateful facades built for the JSP storefront. The API is stateless in contract but stateful in implementation.
Hybris Populator Framework: Design Flaws and Memory Pitfalls
The SAP Commerce Converter/Populator pattern optimized for extensibility at the cost of predictability. Deep chaining, invisible runtime graphs, and JVM heap exhaustion are the consequences.
Katalon Is Obsolete: Open Source Has Won
Katalon solved a real problem for its era: giving non-coding QA teams a path to automation. That problem has been solved more effectively by open-source frameworks and AI code generation.
Module Federation Is Coupling Disguised as Micro-Frontends
With 40+ MFEs federated into a single shell, Module Federation creates a distributed monolith – all the operational complexity of microservices with all the coupling of a monolith.
Playwright Is Not a Backend API Testing Tool
Using Playwright for backend API testing in a Spring Boot repo is not reuse – it’s dual-stack maintenance. The right tool depends on what you’re verifying, not what you already have installed.