/blog
Long-form project deep-dives: why they exist, how they work inside, where it got hard, and how I solved it.
← HomeDokploy, ZITADEL, FlexPrice, SigNoz, PostHog, Pangolin, a homegrown SMS gateway built on a 4G modem, and a dozen databases — the full stack that everything else in this blog runs on.
MTProto from scratch in Go: 355 of 781 methods, each backed by a real end-to-end test, honest E2EE on X3DH and the Double Ratchet — and a manifest that once caught 188 working methods still stuck on planned.
A full implementation of Discord's real protocol: REST v9/v10, Gateway v10, voice over an SFU — and the bug that only a real two-participant call could ever catch.
One compromised container, a systematic audit of the rest of the fleet, and six architectural changes: OpenBao, database isolation, network isolation, rootless containers, vulnerability scanning, and updating every image — including the vulnerable Next.js one.
8+ self-hosted MCP servers, two forked AI coding CLIs locked to one hardcoded endpoint, and an LLM gateway behind all of it — what it took to get agent tooling talking to infrastructure with no vendor cloud anywhere in it.
Why spend test-time compute as tokens? I built latentGPT — a from-scratch recurrent-depth reasoner — to study when iterating in latent space beats chain-of-thought, and how to stop it from collapsing.