Posts

Series: How I Used Claude Code to Slash My Cloud Bill by 63% Part 1: The $198/Month Wake-Up Call (you are here) Part 2: Migrating 7 Static Sites to Cloudflare Pages Part 3: Killing the Load Balancer with Cloudflare Tunnel Part 4: Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 Part 5: Connecting Everything with Tailscale Part 6: The Final Architecture - $74/mo and Zero Regrets The Moment I Noticed I’ve been running everything in DigitalOcean since I decided to ditch my home equipment years ago. The appeal was “set it and forget it” – no hardware failures at 2 AM, no power outages taking down my sites, no maintaining physical boxes. And for years, it worked. My bill hovered around $125/month and I didn’t think twice about it. ...

Most security monitoring tools rely on server-side logs or cloud-native telemetry. But what happens when the client is opaque? When a mobile app, a single-page application (SPA), or a proprietary service is behaving in ways the server doesn’t fully document, you need a way to look at the wire directly. This post also marks the beginning of a new experiment: The Rabbit Hole Series. Every Friday, a “Rabbit Hole Generator” I built (which I later took apart in its own post) spits out a new technical topic for me to explore for 30 minutes. This week, the generator gave me mitmproxy. ...

The best automation is the script you wrote once and forgot about. Until you realize you’d be miserable without it. That’s the bar I hold every workflow script to: will this save me more time than it took to write? Most “productivity automation” content you find online fails that test. The scripts look clever in a conference talk, end up in your dotfiles, and collect dust. They solve hypothetical problems, not real ones. ...

A Kubernetes Secret is not actually secret. That’s a hard sentence to sit with, especially if you’ve been dutifully creating Secret objects and patting yourself on the back for not hardcoding credentials in your ConfigMap. The problem runs deeper than most teams realize, and it doesn’t get fixed by following the basic Kubernetes documentation. This post is about what actually works, at different scales, with honest tradeoffs for each approach. ...

This is the final post in “The Centaur’s Toolkit” series, where we’ve explored practical strategies for human-AI collaboration in technical work. This installment steps back from specific tools and practices to ask the bigger question: what does all of this mean for your career? Everyone’s asking if AI will take their job. They’re asking the wrong question. I’ve been watching this conversation play out across tech communities for the past couple of years, and the framing bothers me. “Will AI replace programmers?” produces a yes/no answer that nobody actually believes, regardless of which direction they lean. It generates heat without light. ...