GitHub is a great place to store notes 😝

After I get all the functionalities dialed in on the website, I will migrate everything over to Postgres to see if there is any performance improvements on that database for Flarum and my functions.

Been working hard on porting my main website inside of a Flarum stack.

Not going to lie... My theory is, if I give Claude 20 tasks to do while I sleep, it may make the time to flip that much faster. We will see how much I have to rework on this.

I really hope I don't cause more headaches for myself.

Been stuck in traffic due to a car accident for a while now… Police car shutdown the entire path.

I have officially abandoned Windows 11! I am 100% on CachyOS!

I’ve really grown impatient with Social Media lately.

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.