Blog archive by Mattias Geniar on ma.ttias.be

Building Snapkin means running a lot of experiments.

This post replaces “Transitioning from Laravel Echo Server to Laravel WebSockets”, which I wrote for the Oh Dear blog on 4 December 2018.

Snapkin went live in the App Store on September 24th.

Agentic coding lets me move very fast.

Snapkin is live on iPhone and Android. 😄 Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play For the past few months, I’ve been working on a calorie tracker.

9000 RPM.

I’ve found my ideal format for shipping apps for personal & family use: PWAs, with an offline-first focus, rendering (mostly) entirely client-side.

A git worktree workflow eats a lot more disk than you’d expect.

For the last few months my laptop has been the bottleneck in my own workflow.

Alex West wrote Not Business Advice , a free series of 13 short books about building profitable personal projects, compiled from the daily blog posts he’s written since 2018.

We watch websites for a living at Oh Dear , which puts us in a unique position: we have data on a lot of different outages.

You can already point an AI agent at your Filament admin panel and have it click around like a human.

Laravel Octane promises a faster Laravel: keep your app booted in memory, skip the framework bootstrap on every request, do less work per request.

I’ve been moving our CI off GitHub-hosted runners onto our own arm64 hardware.

Google PageSpeed flagged a stylesheet on ohdear.app the other day: front.css, the bundle for its public-facing pages.

Every server I run, including the fleet behind Oh Dear ’s uptime checks, has the same set of debugging tools installed before anything goes wrong.

I spent a chunk of the last few weeks upgrading a fleet of Ubuntu servers in place, one LTS to the next, with do-release-upgrade.

Back in 2016 and 2017 I recorded a podcast called Syscast : interviews with people I admired in the Linux, open source and infrastructure world.

Alex Hormozi has a solid definition of confidence: You don’t become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.

Back in 2015 I wrote about running Varnish 4.x on systemd , when the RedHat-family packages moved your startup options out of /etc/sysconfig/varnish and into a new /etc/varnish/varnish.params file that the unit sourced.

A long time ago I wrote a Varnish tip about seeing which cookies get stripped in your VCL .

I wrote a piece over on the Oh Dear blog about a failure mode that most uptime monitoring gets wrong: a domain gets pulled from its registry’s zone, but its authoritative nameservers keep answering, and cached resolvers happily serve the stale delegation…

Years ago I posted a handful of Varnish 3.0 one-liners for varnishtop and varnishlog .

Back in 2016 I gave a talk called Varnish Explained and wrote it up slide by slide.

When I wrote about running HTTP/3 with Caddy in 2020 , it was a ritual.

Ten years ago I wrote about Google’s QUIC protocol , back when it was an experiment you could realistically only test against Google’s own servers.

Update: the fix described in this post has since been merged into Laravel and ships in the next 13.x release.

Back in 2016 I wrapped nginx in a Docker container just to get HTTP/2 working.

At Oh Dear , our status pages can run on a customer’s own domain, and we’ve always served on-demand ACME certificates for them: someone points their domain at us, and Caddy provisions a Let’s Encrypt certificate for it automatically.

I’m finding myself thinking longer about the code I write and the features that get developed, than I did before the agentic coding era.