The notebook
Blog.
notes from real projects
Practical writing on Laravel, AI engineering, token costs, SaaS architecture, and the technology decisions that make software cheaper to run and easier to grow.
Cloud & DevOps
8 posts
17 Mar 2026
Cloud & DevOps
CI/CD for a Two-Person Team: A Pipeline That Ships in 5 Minutes
Pragmatic DevOps against the over-engineering trend: the GitHub Actions pipeline I use on freelance projects — lint, test with a real database, build assets, deploy on merge — kept under fiv...
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14 Mar 2026
Cloud & DevOps
Monitoring for Small Teams: A Full Stack Under €50 a Month
Datadog-class bills make no sense below ~10 engineers, and alert fatigue is worse than no alerts. The exact stack I run for client projects — uptime checks, error tracking, slow-query and qu...
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11 Mar 2026
Cloud & DevOps
Zero-Downtime Deploys Without Kubernetes: A Ladder of Options
Most teams overshoot to blue-green or canary when an atomic symlink release plus a five-line health check meets their SLO. A complexity ladder (symlink → rolling → blue-green) with the expan...
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08 Mar 2026
Cloud & DevOps
Do You Need Kubernetes? Hosting Choices for Small SaaS Teams
An honest decision framework from someone who deploys client SaaS on everything from a €20 UpCloud VPS with Forge to managed containers: total monthly cost AND ops-hours cost for VPS, PaaS,...
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05 Mar 2026
Cloud & DevOps
Cloud Cost Optimization for Small SaaS: A 30% Cut, No Downtime
Mid-market SaaS teams routinely find 20–45% savings, and the biggest wins need no re-architecture: scheduling dev/staging off-hours (24/7 non-prod wastes 67% of its cost), right-sizing from...
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27 Aug 2025
Cloud & DevOps
Renewals, expiry and the diary reminder you should not need
Manual renewal tracking always fails eventually — a diary reminder is a single point of failure with a person attached. Here is the automated renewal system that replaced ours.
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20 Aug 2025
Cloud & DevOps
From form submission to live site in 30 minutes
Our provisioning pipeline takes a signup form to a live, DNS-resolved, SSL-secured site in under 30 minutes. The architecture, the job chain, and why idempotency is the whole game.
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16 Aug 2025
Cloud & DevOps
Automating cPanel account provisioning without losing your mind
The WHM API will happily create five hundred accounts for you — and quietly ruin your week. The endpoints that matter, the ones that bite, and the guards I put around them.
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