Writing
Engineering
Laravel, Vue, PHP, the homelab, and notes from building software since 2018.
2026 3 posts
- My Homelab on Proxmox: From One Raspberry Pi to a 20U Rack Seven years after I called the Raspberry Pi 4 'a direction', the direction has a floor rack, dual-WAN failover, and opinions about VLANs. A tour of the homelab. engineering
- Building Graveyard Analytics: Managing My Jellyfin Server's Afterlife Why I built a Jellyfin plugin that finds dead media, tracks resource vampires, and reclaims terabytes from my homelab. engineering
- macOS Homebrew PHP-FPM Setup Guide The steps after installing a new PHP version with Homebrew — pool config, a per-version port convention, validation, and the Nginx wiring, plus troubleshooting. engineering
2025 10 posts
- PHP 8.5 and 30 Years of PHP The annual language notes, anniversary edition — the pipe operator lands in the year PHP turns thirty, and the language that was supposed to die keeps shipping the most dependable upgrade in the calendar. engineering
- Writing a Jellyfin Plugin in .NET (Lessons) A PHP lifer learns C# the practical way — by building the Jellyfin analytics plugin last month's post wished existed. Field notes on the plugin model, the language border-crossing, and AI as a learning accelerant. engineering
- Jellyfin vs the Streaming Giants: State of FOSS Media The free, no-strings media server has quietly become excellent while its commercial rival alienates its base and the streaming bundle re-invents cable. A state-of-the-stack report. engineering
- GPT-5 and the Frontier-Model Plateau Debate The most anticipated release in AI arrived to the most muted reception — a router, a backlash, and a genuinely useful model that proved the wrong point. On what "plateau" does and doesn't mean. engineering
- Local AI on the NAS: Practical Homelab Inference Two years after the first llama.cpp experiments, local inference is a settled homelab service — small models got good, the tooling got boring, and the NAS earned a new job description. engineering
- Building with AI Agents in the Terminal The agent finally shipped, and it lives where I always did — the shell. A month of working with CLI coding agents, and what changed since the AutoGPT toy era. engineering
- MCP: A USB Port for AI Tools The Model Context Protocol is having its adoption moment — even OpenAI just adopted a standard authored by its rival. Why a boring protocol matters more than this quarter's model release. engineering
- Laravel 12 + "Vibe Coding" Enters the Lexicon Laravel 12 ships the quietest release of the annual era — new starter kits, minimal breakage — the same month Karpathy names the practice of coding without reading the code. Both are about the same question. engineering
- DeepSeek R1: The Model That Moved Markets A Chinese lab open-sourced an o1-class reasoning model, claimed startlingly low training costs, and briefly erased more market value in a day than most countries produce in a year. The floor just caught the frontier. engineering
- Resolving "'node': No such file or directory" with nvm nvm-installed Node vanishes in non-interactive shells — cron jobs, CI, SSH commands. Two symlinks make node and npm globally accessible without ditching nvm. engineering
2024 9 posts
- PHP 8.4: Property Hooks at Last The annual PHP notes — property hooks end the getter/setter era, asymmetric visibility ends the readonly workarounds, and new MyClass()->method() ends a decade of parentheses. engineering
- Drupal CMS (Starshot) and the Modern CMS Race Drupal is building its way out of the "powerful but hostile" corner — Starshot promises a product, not a framework kit. Notes from someone who builds on both Drupal and Laravel for a living. engineering
- o1 and "Reasoning" Models Change the Game OpenAI's o1 thinks before it answers — literally, billably, and behind a curtain. What test-time compute means, where it actually helps, and the new pricing physics of intelligence. engineering
- Pi-hole, Proxmox, and the Self-Hosted Resurgence Self-hosting has quietly gone from niche hobby to mainstream movement — and the forces driving it are the exact failures this blog has been cataloguing for four years. A state-of-the-homelab address. engineering
- CrowdStrike: The Day Windows BSOD'd the World One malformed config file in a security product blue-screened 8.5 million Windows machines, grounded airlines, and closed hospitals. The largest IT outage in history is a checklist of every deployment sin. engineering
- Apple Intelligence: On-Device AI for Everyone Apple finally said the quiet part — a ~3B on-device model, a "Private Cloud Compute" architecture, and ChatGPT demoted to an opt-in plugin. The local-AI thesis just got its biggest endorsement. engineering
- GPT-4o and Voice-First AI GPT-4o makes frontier AI talk — interruptible, emotional, near-human latency — and gives it away free. On the interface shift, the demo-day déjà vu, and what omni-models change for builders. engineering
- The xz Backdoor: Open Source's Near-Miss A multi-year social-engineering operation put a backdoor in a compression library on the road to every Linux server's SSH daemon — and one engineer's 500ms of curiosity caught it. The scariest software story ever told. engineering
- Laravel 11 Slims Down + Claude 3 Arrives Laravel 11 deletes half the skeleton on purpose, and Anthropic's Claude 3 gives the pair-programming crown its first real challenger. March notes from the stack. engineering
2023 10 posts
- Gemini Launches; The Model Race Is Real Google finally answered GPT-4 — with impressive benchmarks, a three-tier model family, and a demo video that wasn't what it appeared. Closing the ledger on AI's breakout year. engineering
- OpenAI DevDay, GPTs, and the Five-Day Firing Saga In one November, OpenAI shipped its platform play and nearly ceased to exist. What DevDay means for builders, and what the boardroom weekend taught everyone who builds on a single vendor. engineering
- Passkeys Go Mainstream: Killing Passwords Google just made passkeys the default sign-in option for billions of accounts. How WebAuthn actually works, why it ends phishing, and what web devs need to do about it. engineering
- Mistral 7B: Small Models, Big Punch A French startup released its first model as a magnet link with an Apache license — and it beats models twice its size. Why efficiency is the most interesting axis in AI right now. engineering
- Self-Hosting an LLM on Homelab Hardware Llama 2 runs on my own machines — no API key, no cloud, no per-token bill. The practical guide and the honest performance verdict. engineering
- Threads' 100M Sprint + Llama 2 Goes Open Meta had quite a month — Threads broke ChatGPT's adoption record in five days, and Llama 2 made capable LLMs free for commercial use. The second one matters more. engineering
- AutoGPT and the Agent Hype Cycle, Round One Give GPT-4 a goal, a loop, and tool access, and it "works autonomously" — briefly, expensively, and in circles. Why AutoGPT matters anyway. engineering
- GPT-4 and the First Real Pair-Programming AI GPT-4 landed March 14 and the difference is qualitative — it holds architecture in its head, reads screenshots, and argues back correctly. Field notes from ten days of pairing with it. engineering
- Laravel 10 + Bing/Sydney's Weird Week Laravel 10 ships on Valentine's Day with native types everywhere — the same month Microsoft's Bing AI tried to break up a journalist's marriage. February contained multitudes. engineering
- ChatGPT Hits 100M Users: What It Means for Juniors Two months in, ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer app in history — and it writes CRUD better than a first-year dev. Honest thoughts on what changes for people entering the industry. engineering
2022 9 posts
- PHP 8.2 and Readonly Classes PHP 8.2 lands with readonly classes, DNF types, and — the sleeper change — deprecated dynamic properties. The annual upgrade notes for working Laravel devs. engineering
- Musk Buys Twitter: Platform Risk for Devs The bird is freed, allegedly. Beyond the circus, the acquisition is a live case study in platform risk — for the developers, businesses, and communities built on someone else's land. engineering
- The Merge: Ethereum Goes Proof-of-Stake Ethereum swapped its consensus engine in flight — cutting energy use ~99.95% — without stopping the chain. Whatever you think of crypto, the migration itself deserves engineering respect. engineering
- Stable Diffusion: AI Images on Your Own GPU Four months after DALL·E 2 amazed from behind a waitlist, Stable Diffusion shipped its weights to the public. The self-hosting era of AI starts now. engineering
- Vite, esbuild, and Leaving Webpack Behind Laravel just swapped Mix for Vite as the default frontend tooling. Why the dev server that doesn't bundle won, and migration notes from the trenches. engineering
- UST/LUNA Collapse: When "Stable" Isn't An algorithmic stablecoin death-spiraled and erased ~$40B in a week. How the UST/LUNA mechanism worked, why it was reflexive by design, and what "stable" should have meant. engineering
- War, Sanctions, and Open-Source Supply Chains The war in Ukraine reached the npm registry — protestware in node-ipc deleted files based on IP geolocation. On trust, lockfiles, and what "supply chain" means when the supply is volunteers. engineering
- Laravel 9 and the New Yearly Release Cadence Laravel 9 ships five months late, on purpose — the framework moves to one major release per year. What's actually in the release and why the cadence change matters more. engineering
- Wordle and the Beauty of Tiny Web Apps A dependency-free, ad-free, one-puzzle-a-day web page conquered the internet and got acquired by the New York Times. A love letter to small software. engineering
2021 8 posts
- Log4Shell: A Wake-Up Call for Self-Hosters CVE-2021-44228 turned a logging library into a remote-code-execution skeleton key for half the internet. What happened, why it's rated 10.0, and the homelab checklist it demands. engineering
- PHP 8.1: Enums, Readonly, Fibers — Finally PHP 8.1 ships the feature PHP devs have requested for a decade. What enums, readonly properties, and fibers mean in practice for Laravel codebases. engineering
- The Day Facebook Disappeared (BGP and DNS for Devs) Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp vanished from the internet for six hours — locked out by their own network change. What BGP and DNS actually do, explained through the outage. engineering
- The Poly Network Hack and Smart-Contract Risk Someone stole $611M from a cross-chain bridge, then gave it back. The strangest heist of the year is also the clearest lesson in what "code is law" actually costs. engineering
- Axie Infinity: Play-to-Earn Takes Over the Philippines A Pokémon-like NFT game has become a source of income across the Philippines. How Axie's economy actually works under the hood — SLP, AXS, breeding, and the Ronin chain. engineering
- Building on a Chip Shortage: The GPU and Console Drought PS5s are scalped, GPUs cost double MSRP, and car factories are idling — all from the same semiconductor crunch. How the shortage happened and what it means for builders and gamers. engineering
- NFTs Explained for PH Devs (or: How a JPEG Sold for $69M) Beeple's Christie's sale made NFTs front-page news. What a non-fungible token technically is, what it isn't, and how to think about the mania as a developer. engineering
- GameStop, Reddit, and the Week Retail Trading Apps Blinked A subreddit squeezed Wall Street, Robinhood froze the buy button, and every developer got a lesson in what "platform risk" really means. engineering
2020 8 posts
- PHP 8.0, JIT, and Apple Silicon: A Big Month for the Stack PHP 8.0 and the M1 Macs landed within days of each other. What actually matters in PHP 8 for working Laravel developers, and why the M1 changes the dev-machine math. engineering
- Laravel 8 + Jetstream: The Community Debate Laravel 8 is a great release wrapped in a controversy. On Jetstream, the Livewire/Inertia fork in the road, and what the noise gets wrong. engineering
- Vue 3 Lands: Composition API First Impressions Vue 3.0 "One Piece" is out. Hands-on first impressions of the Composition API, refs vs reactive, and what it means for Laravel + Vue teams. engineering
- E-Wallets Go Mainstream: The GCash Leap Lockdown did what years of fintech marketing couldn't — it made the Philippines go cashless. A developer's look at the e-wallet surge and what it means for the apps we build. engineering
- Zoom, Meet, and the Sudden Weight of Video Calls Zoom went from 10 million to 300 million daily participants in four months, and the cracks showed — zoombombing, encryption claims, and what it taught developers about scale. engineering
- Overnight WFH: A PH Developer's Lockdown Setup Luzon went into Enhanced Community Quarantine and every developer in the country became remote overnight. Here's what the first week actually looked like. engineering
- Setting Up a Dev Machine for the Unknown A checklist for making your development setup portable and reproducible — written in the last quiet month before everything changed. engineering
- Taal, Ashfall, and the Question Nobody Asked: Can Your Team Work From Home? The Taal eruption shut down offices across Calabarzon and Metro Manila — and exposed how unprepared most PH companies were for remote work. engineering
2019 8 posts
- PHP 7.4: Typed Properties at Last The last of the 7.x line ships the feature every PHP codebase has been faking with docblocks — typed properties — plus arrow functions and preloading. engineering
- Laravel 6: Semver, Ignition, and Growing Up Laravel 6 drops the 5.x naming forever — semantic versioning, a gorgeous new error page, lazy collections, and a framework visibly settling into adulthood. engineering
- Raspberry Pi 4: The Seed of a Homelab Four gigs of RAM, real gigabit, USB 3 — the new Pi crosses the line from educational toy to legitimate tiny server. Dangerous thoughts about home infrastructure follow. engineering
- Laravel Vapor: Serverless PHP Arrives At Laracon US, Taylor Otwell announced Vapor — Laravel deployed on AWS Lambda with no servers to manage. What serverless PHP means, and who it's actually for. engineering
- Vue 3's Function-API RFC Drama: Governance in the Open An RFC for Vue 3's new function-based API set the community on fire this week — fears of becoming React, fears of breaking everything. Notes from a working Vue dev on the noise and the substance. engineering
- The Huawei Ban: Platform Risk in Your Pocket The US entity list cut Huawei off from Google's Android overnight — and millions of PH phone owners learned their device's future was a geopolitical variable. engineering
- The First Image of a Black Hole: Petabytes on Airplanes The Event Horizon Telescope photographed M87's black hole by turning Earth into one big dish — and moved the data by flying hard drives, because physics beats fiber. engineering
- Stadia and the Cloud-Gaming Promise Google announced Stadia at GDC — games streamed from the datacenter, no console required. The engineering is real; the physics and the business model are the questions. engineering