Platform Engineering

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, container automation, and developer platform tooling.

10 notes in this category.

1 Oct 2026Platform Engineering13 min read

Self-hosting n8n on Synology DSM with Docker Compose

n8n on Synology DSM with external task runners, one Postgres with a role per service, SearXNG, Browserless, ntfy, NocoDB and Grafana, and what DSM changes.

24 Sept 2026Platform Engineering8 min read

Running the n8n Assistant code sandbox on Synology DSM

n8n's Assistant sandbox fails on Synology DSM because five kernel features are missing. The errors, the settings that work around four, and what they cost.

14 Sept 2026Platform Engineering9 min read

Playwright smoke tests as a deploy gate in GitHub Actions

A five-journey Playwright smoke in GitHub Actions that blocks promote, a nightly ladder that does not, and the checks that keep red meaning stop.

4 Sept 2026Platform Engineering9 min read

Zero-downtime database migrations with GitHub Actions

Rollback-safe database migrations with GitHub Actions. Expand, drain, contract: the schema, queue, and config changes a digest rollback cannot undo.

29 Aug 2026Platform Engineering9 min read

Standardising CI/CD pipelines across teams

Reusable GitHub Actions workflows, Environment-scoped OIDC, and digest promotion so several teams ship without each inventing a private release path.

21 Aug 2026Platform Engineering8 min read

Terraform module patterns for multi-environment cloud estates

Terraform module boundaries, environment roots, isolated state per account, and pinned promotion, so teams can extend a cloud estate without breaking it.

30 May 2018Platform Engineering3 min read

Fixing Chef cluster issues

Recover a high-availability Chef cluster when Elasticsearch shard allocation or service health issues block normal Chef Server operation.

22 May 2018Platform Engineering2 min read

Configuring UTF-8 collation for MySQL or MariaDB on Docker

Configure MySQL or MariaDB character sets and collations in Docker, verify Unicode storage, and understand durability tradeoffs.

19 Jun 2015Platform Engineering3 min read

Marketing vanity URLs

Create trackable vanity URLs for print, QR, and email campaigns with Apache redirects, UTM parameters, and maintainable campaign rules.

13 Feb 2014Platform Engineering3 min read

Git tips and tricks

Practical Git commands for rewriting authors, recovering work, inspecting history, bisecting bugs, and keeping repositories maintainable.

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