Notes

Practical notes from cloud architecture, platform engineering, security, and production operations.

All notes

11 Sept 2019Security and Compliance5 min read

Hardening WordPress on LAMP (Apache)

A layered WordPress hardening checklist for Apache on LAMP: SSH, .htaccess, wp-config, uploads, and plugin controls, with Nginx equivalents where useful.

23 Aug 2019Security and Compliance11 min read

Hardened WordPress on Ubuntu 18.04 LEMP

Deploy a production-ready WordPress LEMP stack on Ubuntu 18.04 with Nginx, MariaDB, PHP, TLS via Let's Encrypt, and baseline hardening controls.

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.

13 Jan 2016Operations and Performance2 min read

Installing MongoDB on Ubuntu 15.04

Resolve MongoDB service startup failures on Ubuntu 15.04 during the Upstart-to-systemd transition, with unit files and verification steps.

9 Oct 2015Operations and Performance2 min read

CSV UTF-8 encoding issues in Excel

Fix CSV UTF-8 encoding corruption in Microsoft Excel with correct import settings, UTF-8 BOM handling, and verification steps.

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.

9 Oct 2014Cloud Architecture2 min read

Avoid duplicate-content SEO issues on Cloudflare origin subdomains

Prevent Cloudflare origin and preview subdomains from creating duplicate-content SEO issues with host-aware robots, canonical URLs, and redirects.

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.

23 Nov 2013Operations and Performance2 min read

Lazy loading images with JavaScript

Use native browser lazy loading first, understand LCP and CLS tradeoffs, and keep JavaScript lazy-loading libraries for legacy cases.

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