Daily Dump: 2026-03-23
Daily Dump: 2026-03-23
Quick notes from today. Not polished, just what stuck.
The thing I kept hitting today
Was debugging a container that wouldn’t start in Docker. Logs said nothing useful — the usual “exit code 1” with no stack trace. Took me 20 minutes to realize I’d typo’d an env variable name in the compose file. Of course I had. The lesson, as always: read the actual error message instead of skimming it.
What I’m watching
There’s been a steady stream of posts lately about people self-hosting more of their stack. Good trend, honestly. Vendor lock-in is a tax most folks don’t think about until they’re paying it. I still run most of my own stuff — n8n, a Postgres instance, a few odds and ends — and the control is worth the occasional Sunday maintenance window.
A small win
Finally got my Playwright tests to run reliably in CI. The fix was adding a retry on flaky network calls and dropping the worker count to one. Counterintuitive, but two workers were racing for the same test database. Spent a week on that. Don’t be like me.
One nitpick
Vendor docs that put the “quickstart” before the “prerequisites” section. Just stop. I’ve wasted more time on those than on actual bugs. Put the prerequisites first, every time. It’s not clever, it’s just useful.
Back at it tomorrow.