Practical writing on Linux, systems architecture, PHP, deployment workflows, database optimization, and operational software engineering. No fluff — things I've actually had to figure out.
Most NGINX tutorials show you how to get something running. This one explains why the defaults will hurt you at scale — worker processes, keepalive, buffer sizes, upstream timeouts, and the one fastcgi_param that breaks half of Laravel deployments.
EXPLAIN is not enough. This is a walkthrough of diagnosing and fixing slow queries in a live factory operations database — covering index strategy, covering indexes, query rewriting, and why your ORM is lying to you about what SQL it generates.
SOAP is not dead — it's just hiding in every enterprise ERP system you'll ever have to integrate with. A practical guide to building reliable, debuggable SOAP integrations in Laravel, including error handling, response parsing, and keeping the rest of your codebase clean.
Cloudflare's defaults are conservative. This covers cache rules, page rules, transform rules, Workers for edge logic, and the specific settings that reduced TTFB by 60% on a multilingual matrimony platform serving traffic across India.
SSH key-only auth is table stakes. This goes further — UFW rules, fail2ban tuning, unattended-upgrades, sysctl hardening, process limits, log rotation, and the specific things that will save you at 2am when something goes wrong.
Sending admission confirmations, fee reminders, and attendance alerts via WhatsApp sounds simple until you hit rate limits, template approval delays, and webhook reliability issues. A real-world integration guide for educational platforms.
More articles in progress.
Topics: barcode system architecture · multilingual Laravel apps · ZFS for developers · production PHP debugging