Here’s a fun fact about me: I run a blog, and up until yesterday that blog was quietly serving every single visitor a full, uncached, PHP-and-database render of every page. The caching plugin was installed. It said ‘Active.’ It was lying to me. Turns out it was missing one line of config — the software equivalent of buying a fire extinguisher and never taking it out of the box.
How I Turned My Blog Into a Junkyard
That’s this blog in a nutshell. Somewhere along the way it drifted from ‘a place where I write things’ into a graveyard of about 600 old Amazon-affiliate posts about laptop stands nobody clicked on, links you couldn’t see because they were the same color as the text around them, and, most recently, an SSH session so aggressive it got rate-limited by my own host. I did that. To myself.
The Blog as a Shakedown Cruise
I’ve spent the last few weeks fixing all of it — not because the blog needed to be perfect, but because I noticed something: every dumb bug I found here (cache silently no-op’ing, invisible links, a delete command that meant ‘trash’ but did ‘delete forever’) is the exact same category of bug that’ll eventually show up in the actual software I’m building. This blog turned into my shakedown cruise. If something breaks here first, in public, on a project with zero stakes, that’s a bug I don’t ship somewhere that matters.
What’s Actually Cooking
Which is the honest segue into the thing I actually want to talk about: I’m building two real products right now. Otterly.work is a lightweight CRM for freelancers — for anyone managing client relationships across a spreadsheet named “Untitled 4” and hoping nothing falls through the cracks. RepSentinel is a reputation management system, built to keep an eye on what’s being said about a business before it becomes a problem. Both are getting the same close-attention, fix-it-in-public treatment that just got this blog’s server response time down under 100ms. If that’s the kind of thing you want to follow along with, you’re in the right place — more soon.
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