https://carminedev.it/blog Software Technologies student and Junior Full Stack Developer with 2 years of experience building distributed backend systems, REST APIs, and secure, scalable web applications. Passionate about software architecture, Kubernetes, and cybersecurity. en https://carminedev.it/blog/linux-server-admin-basics https://carminedev.it/blog/linux-server-admin-basics Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT You don't need to be a sysadmin to self-host reliably — just a small, repeatable checklist that covers the ways side projects actually go down. https://carminedev.it/blog/laravel-resilient-apis https://carminedev.it/blog/laravel-resilient-apis Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Lessons from building and maintaining production APIs at scale — validation, error handling, and versioning strategies that actually hold up. https://carminedev.it/blog/nextjs-app-router-portfolio https://carminedev.it/blog/nextjs-app-router-portfolio Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Server Components, colocated section components, and what actually changed when moving off the Pages Router. https://carminedev.it/blog/firebase-side-projects https://carminedev.it/blog/firebase-side-projects Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Firebase gets dismissed as 'not a real backend' by a lot of developers who'd actually ship faster using it for the right kind of project. https://carminedev.it/blog/docker-kubernetes-side-projects https://carminedev.it/blog/docker-kubernetes-side-projects Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT You don't need a company cluster to understand orchestration — a weekend project and a single-node setup will teach you most of what matters. https://carminedev.it/blog/learning-java-after-php https://carminedev.it/blog/learning-java-after-php Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT I'd been writing object-oriented PHP professionally for years before university made me formalize it in Java. That order taught me things a textbook-first path wouldn't have. https://carminedev.it/blog/backend-security-basics https://carminedev.it/blog/backend-security-basics Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Not a pentesting deep-dive — the unglamorous, easy-to-skip habits that prevent the most common backend vulnerabilities before they ever ship. https://carminedev.it/blog/git-workflow-small-teams https://carminedev.it/blog/git-workflow-small-teams Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT Gitflow is overkill for most side projects and small teams. Here's the lighter workflow I actually use, and when it's time to add more process back in. https://carminedev.it/blog/postgresql-vs-mysql-choosing https://carminedev.it/blog/postgresql-vs-mysql-choosing Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Not a benchmark post. A practical checklist for picking between the two most boring, most reliable choices in relational databases. https://carminedev.it/blog/argo-workflows-distributed-scraping https://carminedev.it/blog/argo-workflows-distributed-scraping Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Cron jobs stop scaling the moment your scraping workload needs to be distributed and retried intelligently. Argo Workflows on Kubernetes is what replaced ours. https://carminedev.it/blog/elasticsearch-index-design https://carminedev.it/blog/elasticsearch-index-design Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Elasticsearch is easy to get running and easy to get wrong. Notes on index design after building cross-domain search over mailboxes and servers. https://carminedev.it/blog/angular-vs-react-enterprise-spa https://carminedev.it/blog/angular-vs-react-enterprise-spa Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT Building a role-based admin panel on Angular after years of React taught me that the 'batteries included' framework tradeoff is real — in both directions. https://carminedev.it/blog/typescript-large-codebases https://carminedev.it/blog/typescript-large-codebases Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT Not every TypeScript feature is worth reaching for. Here are the handful that keep paying dividends as a codebase grows, and the ones I've stopped bothering with.