Category
Tools we use daily: setups, tricks and battle-tested automations.
PegaProx 0.9.x is an AGPL-3.0 panel that manages several Proxmox VE 8 and 9 clusters, plus XCP-ng, from a single screen. It adds live migration across clusters, OIDC with Entra ID, a CVE scanner and one-click hardening on top of the stock GUI, which only covers one cluster at a time.
Three production coding agents, five real tasks measured by time, tokens, and PR quality. No marketing — the actual measurement.
100 must-have apps for your M5 Mac organised into 20 categories: browser, notes, terminal, IDE, containers, AI and more. Each pick with purpose, key features, plugins, pricing in EUR and the official link.
Claude Code leads long-horizon agentic work, Cursor wins for fast daily interactive editing, Aider dominates CI-pipeline automation, and GitHub Copilot fits teams built around GitHub PRs; Windsurf competes with fresh traction. After a year using all five hard, the most productive combination for most people is still Claude Code plus Cursor.
Coolify is an open source self-hosted deployment platform that replicates the Vercel or Heroku experience on your own Docker infrastructure. This guide installs Coolify 4.x step by step on Ubuntu 24.04, from the official script to the first Git deployment with automatic SSL and managed databases.
After fourteen months testing AI-integrated DevOps tools across several teams, the stack that stays is small: Claude Code, Cursor, and Aider for code; PagerDuty AIOps, Datadog Bits AI, and Grafana Assistant for alert triage; and OpenTofu with OPA for infrastructure generation bounded by policy rules.
The AI tool stack a developer uses in 2026 looks nothing like it did eighteen months ago. Agentic editors, review tools, terminal agents, and test assistants have settled into recognizable roles. A practical guide by category.
After a decade of Prometheus, three years of consolidation around OpenTelemetry, and the open stack now mature with Grafana, Loki, and Tempo, concrete recommendations for teams starting or reviewing their observability layer: what fits, what is excess, and what to avoid.
Dokku lleva más de una década como el PaaS mínimo de código abierto preferido por quien quiere la experiencia Heroku sin la factura. En 2025, con Heroku renaciendo bajo Salesforce y con Kubernetes dominando, sigue ocupando un nicho sorprendentemente saludable.
Fly.io has spent years selling the idea that deploying an application across several regions should be almost as simple as pushing an image and writing one config line. After several real projects on the platform, here is an honest read on what it delivers, what is missing, and who it is worth choosing over more classic options.
n8n is the low-code automation project that has best adapted to self-hosting. A walk through the real install with Docker Compose, the database and queue decisions to make, and the points where most people trip up the first time.
Railway and Render have spent years filling the gap between Vercel and AWS. By the fall of 2025 their offering has matured enough for a seasoned assessment: where they beat Heroku, where they fall short of Fly, and what happens when a bill grows.
Spotify announced Backstage Plus, its own commercial offering built on top of the open Backstage project. The result is a de facto fork that raises uncomfortable questions about governance of company-donated CNCF projects. A look at the practical implications and what teams already running Backstage in production can do.
Dokploy has become the most talked-about free alternative to Vercel and Render. It promises Docker Swarm simplicity without the weight of Kubernetes or dependence on a single vendor. We look at where it delivers and where the promise breaks down.
WireGuard is simple over a single link, but hand-building a multi-node mesh quickly turns into a tangle of keys and routes. Patterns that work, when pure WireGuard earns its keep, and when it is worth leaning on Tailscale or Headscale instead.
Los editores de código han empezado a incorporar MCP como cliente nativo: VS Code, Zed, Cursor y varios forks de Neovim. Esto cambia la forma en que el agente accede al contexto del proyecto y abre preguntas prácticas sobre qué servidores activar y cómo configurarlos sin abrir puertas.
Polars lleva dos años pidiendo relevo a pandas. Con Polars 1.x estable y una comunidad creciente, toca revisar dónde de verdad compensa migrar, dónde pandas sigue ganando y cómo convivir entre ambos sin pagar dos veces.
Seis meses después de que MCP se volviera el protocolo común de integración de agentes, el catálogo comunitario supera el millar de servidores. Repaso cuáles uso a diario, cuáles son ruido y cómo separarlos sin caer en la trampa de la novedad.
Dependabot and Renovate chase the same goal with different philosophies. I compare both after years running them on my own and client projects, covering when one fits better and when the other suits a team's workflow more.
Coolify delivers a Vercel- or Heroku-like experience on your own servers: automatic HTTPS, managed databases, and branch previews without per-build or bandwidth fees. After several months using it on production VPS, here is where it shines, where it still has rough edges, and which teams will genuinely benefit from it.
A home lab is a self-hosted services lab, at home or on a VPS, where you practice real system administration: reverse proxy, centralized authentication, monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana, and backups verified with Restic. A second-hand mini PC with 16 GB of RAM is enough for thirty or forty containers, and what you learn transfers directly to professional work.
Two years running AI-assisted code review in a real team leave a clear balance: AI catches mechanical oversights well and writes useful pull-request summaries, but it struggles with architectural judgment and produces many false positives on subtle bugs. The single decision that helped the most was not blocking merges on its automated comments.
Generics arrived in Go in March 2022 with high expectations and some skepticism. Three years on, idiomatic code barely uses them on the surface, but they have transformed deep libraries: type-safe collections, database clients, concurrency primitives. This analysis examines what has taken hold and why.
Vector is the Datadog observability agent, written in Rust with its own transformation language VRL. Typically 30-100 MB memory, handling logs, metrics, and traces from dozens of sources. The right choice when pipelines are too complex for Fluent Bit and a modern alternative to Logstash.
Ollama became the standard for running large language models locally in 2024. It wraps llama.cpp in a single binary with Docker-style CLI and an OpenAI-compatible API. Phi-3 Mini runs in 4 GB; Llama 3.1 8B Q4 needs 6 GB. For production traffic at scale, vLLM remains the correct choice.
Figma Dev Mode is the developer-facing view inside a Figma file: it generates ready CSS, exposes exact measurements, maps variables to tokens, and, with Code Connect, links each component to the real codebase snippet. It solves most of the design-to-code handoff friction, but it does not replace human judgment on accessibility, performance, or responsive behavior.
Docker Scout continuously scans container images against CVE databases including NVD and ecosystem-specific advisories, and recommends base-image changes to remove vulnerabilities. Built into Docker Desktop and Hub, it competes with Trivy, Grype and Snyk. Best fit for teams already running end-to-end on the Docker ecosystem.
Grafana Beyla is an eBPF agent that automatically instruments existing applications without touching their code: it observes kernel syscalls and generates OpenTelemetry traces and RED metrics for services written in Go, Java, Python, Node, and Rust. It gives broad, immediate coverage, but it does not replace the manual SDK for business metrics and internal logic.
Aider is an open-source CLI that connects your Git repository to an LLM to refactor code, add features and fix bugs without leaving the terminal. Works with GPT-4o, Claude and local models via Ollama. Every change generates an automatic commit with a descriptive message, integrating natively into the Git workflow.
GitLab Duo brings native AI into the whole devops flow: code completion, chat, MR summaries and vulnerability explanation. Duo Pro costs 19 dollars per user monthly on top of Premium or Ultimate, the same as GitHub Copilot Business. It pays off when your team already lives in GitLab.
OpenTofu reached GA in January 2024 as an open-source Terraform fork under MPL 2.0, with Linux Foundation governance. Six months later, it is a stable drop-in replacement: same configs, same state format, same CLI. Version 1.7 adds native state encryption, the first real technical edge over Terraform.
Ansible and Pulumi solve different problems and are not competitors: Ansible manages configuration inside a server (packages, users, services); Pulumi defines, with real code in TypeScript, Python, Go or .NET, which cloud infrastructure exists (VPCs, instances, databases). Combining them, with Pulumi's dynamic inventory feeding Ansible, is the most productive pattern for automating a stack that includes servers in the cloud.
Fluent Bit is the CNCF's lightweight log collector: a ~1.5 MB C binary that rarely tops 30 MB of memory in production. It beats Promtail, Vector, and Filebeat when several destinations or resource-constrained nodes are in play, thanks to a pipeline of inputs, parsers, filters, and outputs that stays easy to reason about and debug.
LM Studio is a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux that downloads and runs large language models on your own machine, with a polished chat interface and no terminal required. It includes an OpenAI-compatible API and RAG with your documents. For individual use it beats Ollama on user experience; for teams or production, OpenWebUI, vLLM, or TGI are the better fit.
Semaphore is the open-source Ansible web UI that solves the four scaling problems: audit trails, role-based permissions, execution history, and centralised secrets. It consumes ~500 MB versus AWX at ~4 GB. The pragmatic choice for mid-size teams that have outgrown running playbooks from a shared terminal.
Traefik is the default reverse proxy for Docker Swarm: automatic service discovery via labels, Let's Encrypt certificates with DNS challenge, and reusable middleware chains. This guide covers the overlay network, static and dynamic configuration, certificate storage for multi-manager setups, and the production decisions that actually matter.
Cuando una aplicación habla con dos o más proveedores de LLM, antes o después aparece un proxy entre medias. LiteLLM propone uno concreto, y esta es la lectura honesta de qué gana y qué cuesta.
Zed is the editor built by Atom's creators, rebuilt in Rust with a native GPU-rendering UI framework and no Electron. It delivers ~8 ms latency, real-time collaboration with integrated voice and shared cursors, and an open license (GPL v3 + Apache 2.0). A serious VS Code alternative for pairs and small teams.
Cursor is a VS Code fork that puts artificial intelligence at the core of the editor instead of bolting it on as a plugin. It offers inline completion, a chat that understands full project context, and Composer, multi-file editing from a short brief. The Pro plan costs $20 a month and it competes directly with GitHub Copilot.
Retool and Appsmith cut internal tool development time from weeks to days. Retool leads the commercial SaaS market with polished components and enterprise permissions; Appsmith brings open source self-hosting at low or zero cost. Low-code works for dashboards, forms, and simple workflows, and breaks on complex logic or highly custom interfaces.
Flux CD and ArgoCD are the two CNCF-graduated GitOps tools for deploying to Kubernetes with Git as the source of truth. ArgoCD offers a centralised visual UI that manages several clusters from one instance, while Flux is a set of Kubernetes-native controllers with built-in image automation. Neither choice is wrong: it depends on your team and use case.
Backstage is the open-source platform from Spotify for building Internal Developer Platforms: a web portal (Node.js + React) that centralises service catalogs, scaffolding, and technical documentation. Adopted by Netflix, American Airlines, and hundreds of companies since 2020, it needs 1-3 dedicated engineers and pays off for organisations with more than 50 developers.
With quantization, model weights are stored with fewer bits (4, 5, or 8 instead of 16), so Llama 2 13B shrinks from 26 GB to about 7.5 GB. With llama.cpp it runs on an ordinary 16GB-RAM laptop with no dedicated GPU, and the quality loss is smaller than intuition suggests.
OpenTofu is the community fork of Terraform, born in 2023 after HashiCorp switched to the Business Source License. With full file compatibility and Linux Foundation governance, it is the legally safe alternative for organisations with strict open-source policies or for those building products on Terraform.
Podman is the Docker alternative with no central daemon and no root privileges required. Each container runs as a direct child process of the launching user, with rootless support since version 1.0 in 2019. If a container escapes, it does not gain host root. When Podman makes sense and what real differences to expect.
Trivy and Grype are the two leading open-source tools for container image scanning in CI/CD pipelines. Both detect CVEs in OS packages and language dependencies with less than 5% coverage difference. Trivy stands out for IaC scanning; Grype natively integrates the SBOM workflow with Syft.
The Grafana stack combines three open source projects: Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics. All three keep data in object storage (S3/GCS) with a minimal index instead of indexing everything like Elasticsearch, which cuts cost sharply at high volume and lets you correlate metric, log, and trace from a single Grafana panel.
nerdctl is a Docker-compatible CLI that talks directly to containerd, the standard Kubernetes runtime since dockershim was removed in 2022. It adds rootless support by default, encrypted images with ocicrypt, lazy-pulling, and native CNI. It fits best where containerd already runs, though Docker Engine still wins on advanced Compose and Swarm.
