Today Chanel and I launched CloudVise, an AI advisor giving personalized advice across multiple topics. It was a long journey, starting all the way back in July.
Here are some lessons I learnt through the whole process.
I've been working on starting several online applications - simple things like edit PDFs/some other task with Stripe integration. I'm using AWS as my cloud provider (just happens to be something I'm familiar with).
Previously, I'd be paying something like $50 USD/month per application.
Now, I've optimized my stack to run them for less than $5 USD/month each.
In my article on self hosting, I initially wrote about how I was using Btrfs to store my data. However, I ran into issues with app database read/writes becoming very slow due to fragmentation. Additionally, I wanted better space efficiency than offered by RAID1 as I was expanding my hard drive collection.
I have been using GRUB as the bootloader for my home server. Recently, I wanted to upgrade the boot drive (from 512GB to 1TB), and this necessitated regenerating the boot/ESP partitions as well as the bootloader.
Tip
See this for a detailed description of the entire boot process.
I have been using Btrfs for my server for a few years, but recently ran into performance issues with databases and snapshots. On the internet, ZFS seemed a pretty popular alternative, so I decided to compare the two in various aspects.
dm-crypt Causing System FreezesFor the past year, I had been having frequent system freezes on my NixOS desktop and laptop. The system would become completely unresponsive, to the point where only SysRq commands would work.
This is my preferred Git workflow for projects.
A comparison of two memory compression techniques in Linux, which aim to be faster than just using swap, and also reduce writes to swap.
Some notes on how I setup Moonlight to auto-launch on a Raspberry Pi 4, as well as random display/audio issues.
Sometimes your laptop might run too hot and you want to reduce the temperatures.
Apart from cleaning the fans and changing the thermal paste, there are 2 software options available to you.