Been busy working on a bunch of stuff this weekend for Flarum. I hope they'll be happy with it. 🙂

I still focus on areas where it can be improved for the average Joe that comes across the software though. Slowly but surely, that gap is getting narrower!

Spent all day migrating from Mailgun to Postmark 🥱

People need to stop tearing apart LCPL Houston.
Dude is messed up physically and mentally after the Afghanistan Withdrawal. Sure he didn’t look his best there, but he’s reliving the trauma he’s endured 5 years ago.
Instead, honor him and help him. You can clearly tell his spirit is broken.
Displayed heroism and valor; then for 5 years, been in the dark and probably question, “Why did I survive?”
Survivors guilt is real. And it’s tearing him apart.

Woke up tired 🥱

I just want to make the world a better place.

Tired. Off to bed world! It’s been a busy day like always 👍

I deleted this site, just to bring it back. What does it say about me? lol

I've spent the last couple of days redoing and undoing my Link Robins website and business plan. Over and over. Each time the goal was the same: shift it somewhere that hurts me less, somewhere the business might finally catch some momentum. And each time I'd unwind it and start again.

The honest reality is that I should stay exactly where I am. Not because the current shape is perfect, but because the constant tearing-down costs more than any of the rewrites would ever earn back. What I actually need isn't a new direction — it's to make the one I already have more sensible for myself.

The thing I keep circling is Flarum. I've been close to pulling it from my offering entirely and just being done with it. But every time I get there, I remember it's still a real pain point for a lot of people — and that's the whole reason I'm in it. So I'm sticking with it for the time being. Ease the transition, keep it manageable, and maybe adoption picks up over the next couple of months. That's a maybe worth waiting on.

A lot of this doubt isn't really about me. The state of the internet right now is weird and unpredictable. Hard to plan against something that won't sit still long enough to read. When the ground keeps moving, the instinct is to keep moving with it — but that's exactly how you end up undoing your own work every two days.

So the reminder to myself: stop redoing. Stay the course, make it sensible, and let it sit long enough to actually go somewhere.

When I started hosting Flarum forums, the pitch was scale. Help communities that were already big handle the load and keep running. It's a real problem, but it's also a solved one — there's already a market for that, and I was walking into it late.

So I shifted. Instead of scale, I'd help communities grow. That felt closer to the truth of what I wanted to do, but it's exactly where I kept stalling out on clients. Selling "growth" to a forum that doesn't exist yet, or barely does, is a hard thing to land.

The reframe I've settled on is simpler, and I think it's the right one: help communities start and grow with Flarum. Not scale a mature ecosystem, not promise growth to people who haven't begun — just be the easy, obvious place to plant a forum and let it get bigger on its own terms.

Part of this is honestly about me. As a solo operator, the time I was pouring into scaling a growing ecosystem was hurting me, badly. Every hour spent babysitting the high end was an hour I wasn't spending on the thing that actually pays: bringing in more clients and building custom sites. I have to be realistic about where one person's time goes.

So here's the focus. Adoptable pricing, with addons for the people who want more. Get communities in the door at a price that makes saying yes easy. The limits I offer are generous — nothing here stops a forum from getting to a moderate size comfortably — but the revenue that earns an actual profit comes from the custom client work, not from Flarum hosting alone.

That's the part I kept getting backwards. I don't need to win the scale game. I need to win the start — the moment someone decides to launch a community and picks where to put it. From there, growth takes care of itself, and the relationships I build are what turn into the custom sites that keep the whole thing afloat.

Focus on what converts. Everything else was me solving problems I didn't need to own.

I've spent the last week on minimal sleep. Running my own business on one side, working full time for my employer on the other, and neither one got less of me because the other exists.

I'm committed to both causes. The momentum will not slow down. I will succeed at both — and I'll do it while maintaining my relationship with my family, because that part isn't negotiable.

People talk about balance like it's something you find. I don't think it is. The balance is sacrifice: you lose something to gain something. The trick is choosing what you can afford to lose. For me, right now, that's sleep. Sleep slows me down.

I'll catch back up when I can.

There's a principle I keep coming back to, and lately it feels more load-bearing than ever: own what you ship. If you can stand behind every line of what you build — explain what it does, fix it when it breaks, support the people using it — you're doing it right. How you wrote it matters far less than whether you understand it.

That's always been true. What's changed is how easy it now is to ship something you don't understand. I use AI every day — boilerplate, debugging, the boring parts — and I'm not interested in pretending that's a problem. It isn't. The problem is publishing code you've never actually read, can't explain, and won't be able to maintain. AI didn't invent that; it just made it possible at scale.

So I keep coming back to the divide I think is coming. Not between people who use AI and people who don't — that line won't mean much for long. The one that lasts is between builders who understand what they ship and builders who don't. The tools are about to make both kinds far more productive, which means the gap between them gets wider, faster, and a lot more visible. Two people can hand you the same working code; six months later, only one of them can still tell you why it works.

I know which one I want to be, and it's the same answer it would have been ten years ago. The tooling got louder. The bar didn't move.

Native Flarum search is exact-match. Misspell a word and you get nothing back — which is exactly when you're most likely to be searching, half remembering a thread from months ago. So this week I wired up Typesense for Flarum Hosting, and now Pro and Enterprise forums get typo-tolerant, instant search. Fat-finger the query and it still finds the thread.

It's the same shape as the analytics I added earlier: one shared search service running alongside the platform, with each forum walled off in its own space, and the whole thing gated to the Pro and Enterprise tiers. There's nothing for the client to install or babysit — it hooks straight into Flarum 2.0's native search, so it's just part of the hosting. Post something and it's indexed in real time; a quiet weekly pass keeps everything honest.

A forum is really only worth its archive. All that accumulated knowledge — the fix someone posted two years ago, the long thread where a decision got made — is only useful if people can actually find it again. Exact-match search quietly buries most of it. This digs it back out.

I'll be honest: the feature itself was the easy part. Typesense's API had a few sharp edges that took longer to file down than building the thing did. But that's the work — the messy middle is where the polish comes from.

Analytics, then automatic TLS, now search. The platform keeps getting quietly better, one removed annoyance at a time.

I help out on the Flarum forums when I can. This week's thread was a marathon — someone on shared hosting upgrading Flarum 1.8 to 2.0, and nearly everything that could go sideways did. We chipped away at it across thirty-some posts: a blocked exec() function, a full vendor wipe and reinstall, and a database driver that needed correcting — the config said MariaDB; it wanted mariadb. One last extension that hadn't caught up with 2.0 removed, cache cleared, migrations run, and their site came back to life.

Then this landed in the thread:

Thank you so much, Master! You are my Guruji. My website is working now. Thank you for your valuable time, patience, and guidance. I am truly grateful for all your help...

I am nobody's Master and definitely nobody's Guruji. But I'd be lying if I said messages like that — and seeing a post marked as the best answer — don't make the whole thing worth it. That's the loop I keep coming back to: help when you can, and every so often someone takes the time to tell you it mattered.

I've been experimenting with TLS for SaaS by Cloudflare, and it's one of those features that quietly removes a whole category of work.

Last night I shipped custom hostnames for Link Robins status pages. Each client CNAMEs their own subdomain — something like status.client.com — at the status page service, and Cloudflare for SaaS takes care of issuing and renewing the TLS certificate for their hostname. The client keeps their own domain, I don't touch a cert, and it just works.

Next up: expanding the same approach to Flarum Hosting clients. The idea is the same — point your own domain, say forum.client.com, at the hosting, and Cloudflare handles cert issuance automatically. No manual TLS work per client, no walking anyone through certificate uploads — bring your domain, and the rest happens on its own.

Status pages were the proving ground. Forums are next.

I have no idea how Points work at discuss.flarum.org. I just know I went to bed with 8 and woke up with 9.

I could go read how the gamification extension actually scores things, but honestly, the mystery is half the fun. A number went up while I was asleep. I'm counting it as an accomplishment.

Two pull requests landed on the FriendsOfFlarum SEO extension within the last hour, and these are exactly the kind of features I can get behind.

The first one adds a toggle to de-index user profile pages. Profile pages are classic low-value pages for search — thin content, mostly duplicate links — and having them in the index does nothing for a forum but dilute it. The PR does it the right way too: noindex, follow, so crawlers still traverse the links without keeping the page itself in results.

The second one goes further: exclude entire tags from indexing. Pick the tags, and every discussion in them — plus the tag's own listing page — gets de-indexed. Selecting a parent tag covers its children too. That's exactly what you want for off-topic lounges, support dumps, or internal staff areas that have no business showing up in Google.

A lot of SEO tooling is busywork that chases scores instead of outcomes. These two are the opposite: simple controls over what search engines see, solving real problems forum admins actually have. More of this, please.

I've spent the last couple of weeks optimizing my workflow for Link Robins, and the improvements are starting to pay off. The big one: a lot of the deployments for client sites are now offloaded and automated instead of being something I have to babysit by hand.

That frees up real time and headspace. The everyday chores that used to get squeezed in around deployments can actually take priority now, instead of constantly losing out to busywork.

It's a huge quality of life improvement for me.

Sometimes troubleshooting takes hours, even days. Other times it's quick and painless. I've had several run-ins like that this past week — some problems fold the moment you look at them, others make you earn every inch.

My head's already big. And when other people start inflating your work, it can only get bigger. That's the dangerous part — praise feels good, but it's not the same thing as progress.

So the reminder to myself: stay humble, but keep growing. You only cap yourself.

I've been daily driving CachyOS on my personal laptop for about a week now, and every time I type on it or do anything with it, I'm seriously considering wiping my Windows 11 SSD and mounting it as extra storage for CachyOS.

It's really annoying what Windows 11 has become. I need something that just works well, with low resource usage, and that's efficient at everything I throw at it. So far, CachyOS is exactly that.

I wanted to jump to Arch Linux proper, but the curve is too steep. CachyOS gets me the Arch experience without the climb — and I need to get back to what matters: catering to my clients.

With a military background in depot aircraft repair, the easy move was the obvious one: going from I-Level maintenance to Depot Level maintenance. So that's what I did, and I stuck with it for a couple of years.

I found it very unrewarding. Don't get me wrong — the job was decent, and I love contributing to the United States. But it felt like a dead end. Everyone told me I was doing a great job, and then when it came down to promotions it was always the same: empty promises, or a job opening that got cancelled.

Eventually I said enough is enough, and I left.

I'm in a better state now because of that leap. For the first time, I actually feel like an adult.

I'm approaching 1,000 commits on GitHub so far this year. It's not a number I set out to hit — it's just what's piled up from showing up and doing the work.

Each of those commits carries something I learned. Running my own hosting service. Working with clients and figuring out what they actually need. Building and shipping sites and extensions, and all the small, unglamorous lessons that come from getting things into people's hands. There's been plenty more along the way, too.

I don't regret any bit of it. Every challenge was just another avenue of growth — the dead ends as much as the wins.

Will I slow down? Once I'm satisfied — am I there yet? No. Far from it.