testing
Testcontainers and the case against mocking your database
Why I stopped mocking MariaDB and Redis in my Drupal tests, what real-dependency testing with Testcontainers buys you, and the honest state of testcontainers-php.
Tag / Engineering
engineering
RabbitMQ vs Kafka: a working web dev's honest take
A practical PHP developer's guide to what RabbitMQ and Kafka actually are, how their architectures differ, and how to choose without over-engineering.
tooling
Self-hosted PaaS showdown: how I picked Coolify for this blog
An honest, first-hand look at Coolify vs Dokploy, the two open-source Heroku alternatives, and why this blog runs on self-hosted Coolify on an OVH VPS.
ai
cmux is my daily driver for running coding agents
An honest daily-driver review of cmux, the open-source native macOS terminal built for running Claude Code and other AI coding agents in parallel.
security
Enkryptify: field notes on a solo dev's secrets manager
Honest notes on Enkryptify, an EU-based secrets manager that injects your .env at runtime. What I liked, how the encryption actually works, and the lock-in I'd weigh.
video
Making real MP4s with React: a PHP dev pokes at Remotion
A Drupal dev's field notes on Remotion, the React framework that renders real MP4s from components, where it's genuinely useful, and its unusual source-available licence.