Long-form writing on Drupal, PHP frameworks, AI tooling, automated testing and everything else in a working programmer's stack — shipped from production, not theory.
~82% of disaster-recovery setups are never tested. So I actually restored this blog cold into a throwaway container: 23MB dump in ~1s, fresh DB up in ~12s, restore in 3s, verified 47 articles back. The real lesson wasn't the sub-minute RTO — it was that the dump doesn't contain the secrets and config that actually make the site run.
The single most misunderstood corner of Drupal, and the root of ~90% of 'stale content' and 'user B sees user A's data' bugs. The one-line model: stale = a missing cache tag, leaking = a missing cache context. How they bubble, why max-age:0 quietly poisons a whole page, and the debug header that finds the culprit in seconds.
Chroma tested 18 models: accuracy falls well before the advertised limit, and semantically-similar distractors hurt more than the raw token count — models even did better on a shuffled haystack than a coherent one. Plus RULER's 'effective context' and Lost-in-the-Middle. Why curated retrieval still beats stuffing everything in the window.
A peer-reviewed study found regex tied an LLM on accuracy for structured extraction while running 28,000× faster. The case for AI as seasoning, not flour: route the predictable 90% to deterministic code, escalate only the fuzzy long tail to a model. A decision rule, real numbers, and the honest counterpoint (don't parse HTML with regex).
depends_on waits for 'running', not 'ready'. Docker does NOT restart an unhealthy-but-running container — restart policies key on exit code, not health. And a naive curl localhost returns 200 from Drupal's page cache while the DB is down. A Drupal-specific healthcheck that doesn't lie, and why healthcheck ≠ readiness ≠ monitoring ≠ alerting.
PHP's own JIT authors admitted it barely helps real apps like WordPress — ~3.5%. Here's why: a Drupal page is I/O-bound, and Amdahl's law caps what JIT can ever do to ~11% even if it made the CPU work infinitely fast. What actually speeds a site up instead (OPcache, preloading, a real cache backend), and the CPU-bound cases where JIT genuinely earns its keep.
Three core Jellyfin people, including the founder, stepped away in one week of July — mostly burnout, told fairly. The project isn't dying, despite the headlines. But it's a clean look at the bus factor of volunteer FOSS, and the unglamorous things a self-hoster should actually do about it.