Architecture and deployment of proxy protocols with TLS masquerading on a self-hosted VPS: Hysteria 2 (QUIC) and XRay with XTLS-Reality — protocols, installation, systemd configuration, hardening.

Why a DTO must not leak into a Domain Entity, where partial-input mapping breaks, and how to preserve the difference between "not passed" and "passed as default".

An architectural breakdown of why a high-load Symfony project keeps a dedicated DBAL layer next to ORM: where Doctrine ORM's responsibility ends and which tasks belong at the DBAL level.

An architectural position: sharding is a decision at the start of the project, not an after-the-fact fix. Where the architectural foundation ends and the infrastructure engine begins, and which invariants the project must commit to so it does not have to rewrite half the service a year later.

Last year I found myself outside employment. I spent months searching, building side projects in parallel, and at some point realised I wanted to go back to a paid job less and less. This article is the crystallisation of what I saw this year, and an attempt to explain why.

Code intelligence is a closed loop of six kinds of facts around a single CODEBASE. The LLM is the actor that interprets evidence, not a sixth source.

Why an HTTP handler should not be a use-case, and how to keep the application boundary explicit between API Platform and the domain.