A few weeks ago I wrote about building a $0/month enterprise platform on Oracle’s free ARM tier. Twenty-one pods, service mesh, secrets management, AI observability — the whole works, running on a single ARM instance with 24GB of RAM. It worked. Everything was up. The pods were green. I could hit my apps through Traefik and feel smug about paying nothing. But here’s the thing about infrastructure: running is the easy part. The hard part is knowing whether it’s running well — and whether it’ll keep running when something goes sideways at 3 AM. ...

I wanted to run real applications—not toy projects, but actual software I’d use daily. Finance tracking. Job search management. Jupyter notebooks. AI observability for my Claude Code sessions. But I also wanted to do it right. Not “throw it in a Docker container and hope for the best” right. Actually right: Encrypted service-to-service communication Centralized secrets management Automatic failover and recovery Observable, debuggable, maintainable The catch? I didn’t want to pay $50-200/month for a “real” Kubernetes cluster. ...

The terminal is linear. Commands scroll up. Output disappears. Information exists only in the moment. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? The Problem with Traditional Terminals I spend most of my day in a terminal. SSH sessions, log tailing, git operations, monitoring scripts. The workflow is always the same: run a command, read the output, run another command. Previous context scrolls away into oblivion. To cope, we invented tools: ...

The Invisible Systems That Run Your Business Every modern business runs on invisible systems. When you swipe your badge to enter the building, a system checks your credentials. When you submit an expense report, a system routes it for approval. When you check inventory, a system queries a database somewhere. When a customer places an order, dozens of systems coordinate to make it happen. You don’t think about these systems. They just work. Someone in IT set them up, maintains them, and makes sure they’re secure. The systems run in the background while you focus on your actual job. ...