$ ls ./writing

• AWS Day 4: Spinning Up an RDS Instance and Connecting It to My App Jul 15, 2026

  I wire a managed Postgres instance to the FastAPI app from Day 2, get the security group mental model backwards at first, create the whole thing in the wrong AWS region, and break sudo with a virtualenv path mismatch before any of it actually works.

• Learning AWS Day 3: S3 Static Hosting Jul 9, 2026

  I host a static site on S3 with zero servers running, get tripped up by a 403 that actually has two separate causes, and learn why presigned URLs are how real apps hand out temporary access to private files.

• Learning Python - Day 6-8: FastAPI, Pydantic, and the Bugs That Taught Me Both Jul 6, 2026

  Three days building an API on top of everything I'd learned so far, and discovering that FastAPI's type hints aren't decoration, they're the actual validation layer, which I only fully believed after watching a raised exception turn into a silent 200 response.

• Learning AWS Day 2: Deploying a Real API to EC2 (And Locking Myself Out Again) Jun 30, 2026

  I spin up an EC2 instance, fix a chmod permissions error that blocked SSH access, and deploy a simple FastAPI app to it so it's reachable from a public URL. AWS Day 2, EC2 edition.

• Learning Python - Day 4-5: Where Python Stopped Feeling Like Tutorials Jun 27, 2026

  Two days in, I went from learning Python's syntax to actually designing with it: modules, JSON persistence, and a CLI task manager that broke in four different ways before it worked, each bug teaching me something I couldn't have gotten from reading alone.

• Learning AWS Day 1: Account Setup (and the Lockout I Caused Myself) Jun 24, 2026

  Billing alarms, root vs IAM, and the moment I stripped my own admin user of every permission it had by trusting a group attachment that didn't exist yet. AWS Day 1, mistakes included.

• Learning Python - From a Frontend-Heavy JS Backend Dev to Python: My First 3 Days Jun 22, 2026

  I'm a frontend-heavy JS developer who's dabbled in backend with HonoJS and Express, but never gone deep. Here's what actually surprised me, broke, and clicked when I picked up Python for the first time, day by day.

• Self-Hosting n8n on a Cheap VPS: The Setup I Actually Use Jun 21, 2026

  A practical walkthrough of self-hosting n8n with Docker, a reverse proxy, and free SSL - the exact setup running automations for this site.