The Digital Spellbook
Blog Posts
Deep dives into web development, infrastructure chaos, and the art of tinkering with technology.
Featured Posts
Deployed a TLS fingerprinting rule that seemed reasonable. Blocked every Chrome 119 user on Windows. The incident report was not fun to write.
October 14, 2025
7 min read
After using both GitHub Actions and GitLab CI in production, here's my honest comparison of their strengths, weaknesses, and when to use each.
December 20, 2024
5 min read
A practical guide to setting up Prometheus and Grafana for production monitoring. No theory, just battle-tested configurations that actually work.
December 18, 2024
6 min read
Hard-learned lessons from debugging Kubernetes issues at 3 AM. These tricks will save you hours of frustration.
December 15, 2024
2 min read
Learning Terraform the hard way. Here are the mistakes that cost me sleep, money, and a bit of my sanity.
November 28, 2024
2 min read
All Posts
Your containers are probably insecure. Here's how I learned to harden Docker containers the hard way, and the security mistakes that almost cost us.
December 10, 2024
7 min read
Our AWS bill hit $50k/month. Here's exactly how we reduced it to $20k without sacrificing performance or reliability.
December 5, 2024
9 min read