Blog
Writing on distributed systems, infrastructure, and whatever broke this week.
Aug 26, 2026 · 9 min read
Dreamer's Build Pipeline, Round Two: An Env Var That Never Left the Host, and a Shebang Line You Can't See Is Broken
A NEXT_PUBLIC_ variable that was present everywhere except the one place it needed to be, an Image Index that looked exactly like the bug and wasn't, and a container that refused to start on a file sitting right there, readable, correctly permissioned, and somehow still not executable.
Aug 9, 2026 · 18 min read
How GitHub Codespaces Actually Works: A Deep Dive Into VMs, Containers, Port Forwarding, and Persistence
My laptop screen died, so I borrowed my dad's laptop rather than install my whole dev environment on it. GitHub Codespaces made that possible, and it turned into a rabbit hole on how it provisions isolated VMs, persists your code across sessions, and tunnels your dev server to a URL without ever opening a firewall port.
Jul 26, 2026 · 8 min read
Adding Serverless SSR to Dreamer: Two Silent Failures Between a Docker Build and a Public URL
A missing folder that only failed once it mattered, a framework name that meant two different things to two different files, and a 403 that survived a correct policy, a correct AuthType, and a direct curl. Three failures on the way to giving my own Vercel clone real Next.js SSR support.
Jul 10, 2026 · 8 min read
Setting up my home-server on JioFiber: My CGNAT-to-IPv6 Journey
A Cloudflare wildcard SSL limitation, JioFiber's CGNAT, and a stale DNS cache. Three unrelated-looking problems that shared one root cause: traffic quietly going somewhere other than where I assumed.