Articles
These are my various writings. Some might say they are cool.
Zero Isn’t Zero, Part 2: Keeping Strangers From Waking My Apps
November 4th, 2026 — Nine in ten requests waking my Laravel Cloud apps were bots and scanners. Here are the free Cloudflare rules I set up to stop them at the edge.
Zero Isn’t Zero: What Laravel Cloud Actually Costs When Your App Is Asleep
October 22nd, 2026 — I moved three side projects to Laravel Cloud for a month. The bill was $4.87. Here’s what scale to zero really costs, and what never sleeps.
Ten Years Later, It Just Works
September 27th, 2026 — A decade of Particle boards, Raspberry Pis, and homemade relays, and it took Matter and two small SONOFF switches to finally make home automation just work.
From "Ship it" to shipped
July 29th, 2026 — Yesterday I opened [SignUpBreeze](https://signupbreeze.com/) to everyone and turned on payments. It happened during Laracon, which feels right, because Laracon is where the push to finish came from.
Solving My Own Pet Peeve: Why I’m Building SignUpBreeze
May 5th, 2026 — In the world of software, there is a recurring tragedy: a simple problem gets solved, but the solution eventually becomes so bloated with "noise" that the original utility is lost. For me, that breaking point came while trying to manage volunteer events.
Deploy Statamic Static Site Using GitHub Actions
June 8th, 2025 — I recently set up a new Statamic site using the Cool Writings starter kit (statamic/starter-kit-cool-writings). The official documentation walks you through local development and static site generation (SSG), but it doesn’t cover how to deploy to GitHub Pages. Here’s how to do that using GitHub Actions.
From Sculpin to Statamic: Breathing New Life into My Blog
June 7th, 2025 — Sculpin’s ecosystem has slowed to a crawl, and I still want an easy way to publish the occasional post. Statamic gives me an actively maintained, Laravel-powered toolkit that still feels like a static site generator when I need it to.
Running Node.js as a Service
April 28th, 2016 — It is no secret that making sure that you data is flowing is biggest concern for reliable statistics (and pretty pictures). Fortunately systemd now available on all popular Linux distributions so we do not have to write much.
Setup RaspberryPi with Aeotec Z-Stick
March 3rd, 2016 — Now that we have Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, Aeotec Z-Stick and Aeotec Z-Wave Home Energy Meters it is time to get the talking to each other. Pairing Aeotec Z-Stick and Aeotec Z-Wave Home Energy Meters is a no-brainer, just follow instructions in the box. Getting RaspberryPi effectively communicating to Aeotec Z-Stick is a bit less trivial.
Request Rate Limiting in Lumen 5.2
February 29th, 2016 — If you look at Laravel 5.2, you'll find that it has Middleware called "throttle". This particular middleware is capable of limiting requests and works using internal cache system.