Notes from the build
Working notes on the things this site is made of — authentication, self-hosted infrastructure, and the occasional decision to stop. Published when there is something worth saying, which is why there are 4 and not 40.
What it actually costs to host it yourself
PTE Target serves public traffic from a machine I own, behind Cloudflare, administered remotely. Deploying to a platform is easier. This is what the easier option is buying you, and what it hides.
- Infrastructure
- Self-hosted
- Operations
Passkeys on a site nobody is attacking
I put WebAuthn on the admin panel of a personal portfolio — a system with one user and no attackers. The useful part was not making it work. It was writing down what it does not protect.
- Authentication
- WebAuthn
- Security
Everyone enrols in MFA. That is not the number that matters.
Twenty years of watching people route around security they find inconvenient convinced me the interesting question is not which second factor is strongest. It is which one is still switched on in six months.
- Authentication
- Security
- Usability
I shut Calcroo down, and the analytics were not the reason
I built a set of Australian finance calculators, watched the traffic arrive, and found almost none of it was human. Killing it took two weeks longer than the data did, and that delay is the part worth writing about.
- Product
- Post-mortem
This page appears once 3 posts are published — no placeholder posts, no “coming soon”.