Oxycon Blog

There is a moment in every self-hosting story where one Docker host stops being enough.

Every conference talk about breaking up a Rails app shows the same two slides.

Every product that shows a list of "things you might like" is quietly solving a smaller version of the problem YouTube handles on its homepage.

Every engineer learns DRY in their first year: don't repeat yourself, extract the common code, keep one source of truth.

A Rails image that weighs more than a gigabyte is not a Docker problem, it is a packaging problem that Docker makes visible.

Everyone has seen the branch that starts as "just cleaning things up" and turns into a private alternate universe.

AI makes Rails development faster - it also makes it very easy to commit code that looks plausible, passes a quick glance, and quietly breaks a production standard.

Dropping a database column looks harmless until you remember that production does not move in one clean motion.

Messaging is one of those architectural tools that looks cleaner on a diagram than it feels in production.

The first thing a small public server teaches you is that nobody needs to know you exist before they start knocking.

Software teams usually do not need more status meetings.

Software engineering looks like a job about code from the outside.

HTTP caching looks like a small performance feature until it decides to preserve the wrong thing, ignore the right thing, or make your carefully fixed bug appear haunted for another ten minutes.

Rails makes rendering feel almost weightless.

PostgreSQL 18 quietly removed one of those small pieces of application glue that many teams have been carrying for years.