Single-Node Kubernetes GitOps on a Budget
You want GitOps. You don't want to pay $70/month for a managed cluster, operate an etcd quorum, or maintain a fleet of nodes for a side project or small team...
Software Engineer at Stripe, working on the Database Engine team. 10 years across startups and MNCs — infra, platform, databases.
I write about software systems, engineering decisions, and whatever else catches my interest. Previously at VMware, Rippling, and Lavelle Networks.
You want GitOps. You don't want to pay $70/month for a managed cluster, operate an etcd quorum, or maintain a fleet of nodes for a side project or small team...
_2026-03-02_ Your issue tracker has 40 tickets in the backlog. Twelve of them are well-defined, self-contained, and have been sitting there for three sprints because nobody has the bandwidth to pick them up...
A while back I started playing tennis again after a long break. The frustrating thing about tennis is that it's almost impossible to self-correct without video — you feel like you're doing something right, watch the footage, and realise your elbow is at a completely wrong angle at contact...
Technical video content has a persistent problem: a speaker verbally describes a system architecture, an algorithm, or a database schema while the screen shows nothing that helps the viewer build a mental model. Adding visual overlays manually requires authoring diagrams, timing them to the transcript, and re-editing the video — work that rarely gets done...
Back in 2016 or 2017, I first encountered a problem where our system just wasn’t handling the load we were throwing at it. That was my first real "deep dive" into Elasticsearch (ES)...
Aggregates NeetCode 150, Blind 75 and more into ~326 unique problems organized by 20 solution patterns.
Self-hosted mini-PaaS — deploy Docker containers to SSH nodes with managed Postgres, Redis, Kafka, live logs.
From-scratch Raft-based logical replication with modular sub-managers for WAL, log sync, and leader election.
Job scheduler with a rich DSL — schedules, triggers, job templates, connector integrations, and complex pipelining.