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Practical write-ups for small teams, in plain English. A new post every week.
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Hands-on guide · AWS · US infrastructure
How to Deploy Llama 3.1 on AWS EC2 (g4dn.xlarge) for Under $1/Hour
A complete walkthrough with measured results: 34 tokens per second at about $0.53 an hour.
Hands-on guide · UpCloud · European infrastructure
Deploying Llama 3.1 on UpCloud (NVIDIA L4) with llama.cpp
The same model on EU-hosted hardware: 50.5 tokens per second, for clients who can’t use US infrastructure.
All posts
Secrets in the Wrong Places: Where API Keys End Up and How to Find Them
No one plans to leak an API key. It happens because a key is the fastest way to get something working, and…
Staging Environments: The Cheapest Insurance Most Small Teams Skip
The plugin update went live on Friday afternoon. It had worked on the developer’s laptop. Twenty minutes later, the checkout page starts…
The Monitoring Setup That Would Have Caught It
I help look after an old server. More than once, its disk has filled up. Each time, we’ve found out the same…
Giving an AI Agent Access to Production: What Can Go Wrong?
For a while, AI coding tools only made suggestions. You asked a question, and the tool provided an answer that a human…
What Actually Breaks When a Startup Scales From One Server to Three
A single server provides a forgiving environment. Everything lives in one place. The application, file storage, session data, and cron jobs all…
Legacy Systems Aren’t the Problem. The Plan for Them Is.
“We need to get off this old system” is one of the most common phrases I hear from new clients. They usually…
The Impressive List of Cloudflare Free Account Services
After chatting with a friend who also does DevOps, I revisited the Cloudflare dashboard to take another look at what’s included in…
The Backup Conversation Nobody Wants to Have Until They Need It
Nobody gets excited about backups. They’re not a feature, they don’t show up in demos, and setting them up correctly costs money…
AI Dreams, Hopes and Reality
Please find the list of sources used for this post, at the end of the post. Preface When AI models started to…
