Blog
How to restart an AWS ECS service
Docker containers are easily one of my favorite pieces of new technology of the last decade. They've immensely simplified how I work locally, no more virtual machines, no more trying to keep my local development environment and production servers in [...]
VPS Showdown - April 2022 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr
The landscape of Virtual Private Servers is ever changing and evolving. Gone are the days of providers offering just servers. Many providers offer a wide range of managed services in addition to traditional VPS offerings. Maybe I'm too much of [...]
Response Time Comparison: GitLab Pages vs. Cloudflare Pages
While I compare VPS hosting providers every month, I actually don't my personal blog (this site) on a VPS anymore. Come to think of it, I don't even remember if this particular iteration of my own private slice of the [...]
How to change the hostname on Arch Linux
Admittedly, I rarely ever need to change the hostname of a system. I have my own standard naming convention that I use, and will set things up at the time of installation, never to be touched again. Recently with a [...]
Tracking daily active users (DAU) with Redis
Daily active users, also known as DAU, is the number of unique users that have interacted with a website or application in a given day. We're going to discuss how to track this metric, in a language agnostic fashion. The [...]
VPS Showdown - March 2022 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr
The biggest news this month is that Linode was recently acquired by Akamai Technologies for a whopping $900M. What that will do to the VPS landscape is yet to be seen. The most immediate impact I've noticed is that Linode [...]
How to run a command after changing directories in zsh
About once a year or so, I go through my dotfiles and do some clean up. Usually around spring time, but also, usually after I discover some new hotness that I had not known about that I want to leverage [...]
How to display a JavaScript array in HTML
From time to time, I see a search query that made it to my blog that piques my interest and inspires a post. This is one such post. How does one take an array (presumably in JavaScript) and display it [...]
How to fix signature is unknown trust on Arch Linux
My continued love/hate relationship with Arch Linux continually yields topics to blog about. This week's topic reared it's head while attempting to perform an update after waiting a bit longer than I usually do, which yielded an error about one [...]
VPS Showdown - February 2022 - DigitalOcean vs. Lightsail vs. Linode vs. UpCloud vs. Vultr
Around this time last year, we were dealing with one of the worst winter storms in Texas history. While it's still pretty cold, we've been extremely fortunate this year. Hopefully everybody reading this is staying warm (or cool, if you're [...]