A software engineer rambling about code, literature and everything in between.
If you are self-hosting both a PDS and an Ozone instance , you will want to set up these environment variables on your PDS so that your PDS and Ozone can correctly talk to each other, in particular so Ozone can send email notifications via your PDS SMTP settings, as well as act as its "moderation service". # on your pds.env or your PDS container environment PDS_MOD_SERVICE_DID = "<your Ozone's…
This week I had to recreate a Kubernetes cluster to mitigate an incident on a side project. waking up to find the whole nodepool unexplicably down! oh no! — andrés ignacio torres ( @andresitorresm.com ) November 24, 2025 at 8:17 AM As I'm still learning my way through Kubernetes concepts, I thought it'd be useful (to myself!) to write a quick note on what I've learned about volumes in…
Welcome speech at FediCon 2025. What if the Fediverse met... in real life? Last month, I had the pleasure of attending FediCon 2025 , a local conference for "decentralized social networks and the social web", held here in Vancouver, Canada. I learned about FediCon a while ago through my Mastodon feed, and I signed up for it right away (I didn't have to think much about it, given that the…
From a short trip to Port Moody, B.C. (2023) A couple months ago, I went to a poetry workshop offered for migrants by Vancouver Writers Fest, led by Evelyn Lau. We read, we laughed, we talked, we cried, but most importantly, within those four hours we created a bond, built a community and met others who, for one reason or another, shared at least two threads in common with me: being a writer and…
I've been working on a very cool passion project recently that involves setting up cloud infrastructure on OVH Public Cloud for data sovereignty. As part of the infrastructure design, I needed to set up one resource in a given region and another resource in a different region, and allow them to communicate with each other over private IPs. This is a common use case for cloud networking and I've…
Shoutout to Casey Primozic ( @ameo.dev ) for the wonderful and detailed PDS-alongside-other-services self-hosting guide that inspired this post! It's alive! I've been tinkering with Bluesky for a few months now through several projects, and naturally I've been drawn towards self-hosting (some of) its pieces, given Bluesky's modular and open-source nature. My first step was to self-host a Personal…
One of my readings the other day. Trying to imagine Sisyphus happy. All my life I have loved reading. Ever since I was a kid, I've always kept a book close by. Although I stopped reading constantly for a few years, I recently returned to it as a daily habit. At first, I read physical books and couldn't fathom the idea of reading digitally. Then, I realized that e-books allowed me to carry an…
Photograph by Rashed Paykary on Unsplash . Every developer will eventually have to deal with monetary values in their code some time. This is a tricky thing to get right, and it is absolutely necessary to do so. My two cents (no pun intended) on the matter are: Don't reinvent the wheel # There are many libraries (e.g. dinero for Python) out there that have been built to handle monetary values and…
Photograph by Chris Ried on Unsplash . I've been working visibly on open source projects for a few years now. I started while I was doing my undergrad, participating in the Hacktoberfest in 2019. From there, I moved to contributing a couple of minor changes to random projects I found on the internet. At the same time, I worked on my undergrad thesis openly on a public Github repository, as well as…
This blog post was originally written (and intended to be read) in Spanish . I tried my best to convey the same meaning in my translation below, but your mileage may vary! Photograph by Andrew Neel on Unsplash . For a while, so long that I can't measure, I've felt like my voice is missing. I don't know where I left it last time I saw it, I used it. My fingers dance atop the keyboard, my hand grabs…
A few days ago, as I was cooking (and mindlessly watching YouTube in the background), a book recommendation video caught my eye. A YouTuber was describing her experience reading "The Dip" (Seth Godin, 2007), and how the message behind this book had pushed her into accomplishing several milestones in her path as a content creator and businesswoman. I've never been fond of self-help books, but I…
Facing a dragon for the first time! (image: Wizards of the Coast) Between October and December, I took on the role of Dungeon Master (DM) for the first time to host a short (lv. 1 to 3) introductory Dungeons and Dragons campaign for two close friends, Germán and Gustavo. This was not only my first time as a DM, but my first real taste of a Dungeons and Dragons game overall, as my only other time…
While working on my undergraduate senior thesis a few years ago, I made a small web application to visualize certain patterns as my daily experiments went through. This application was running inside a remote server and was not getting exposed to the public internet, so it was a hassle to check its content. After trying to figure out a way to make it easier to access said application, I stumbled…
A few months ago, I received notice that the botsin.space Mastodon instance was going to shut down by December this year, after more than 7 years of service. I hope bot-makers are able to migrate their bots to other instances and keep them running, to keep the online bot craftmanship alive. While I only found my way into the fediverse a couple years back, I've loved making online bots (e.g. on…
So, I just built a (very simple) web game: Number Sum . The game is a brief number guessing game, in the same vein as Sudoku and others. You have to complete a partially-filled grid with number guesses to ensure that certain conditions are met, namely that all columns and rows sum to the respective hints given on the grid. It took me about two hours to build (plus a few weeks of wanting to build…
When I was younger, I used to read a lot. I used to cram in reading at every possible moment, dashing through trilogies and series in a matter of days. I would consistently start reading a novel, a short story collection, a series of essays and get through the end without getting bored or tired in the process, even if whatever book I had picked didn't fully peak my interest. Physical books,…
Bots are everywhere, and so are malicious agents. They crawl, they scrape, they read... and sometimes (or most? of the times),they abuse . A few times now, I've observed increased CPU / RAM consumption on servers where I wouldn't expect any usage on non-peak hours, and after browsing through access logs, I find out the cause is that certain bots are crawling my sites over and over again. This has…
If you're using the Elementor plug-in for WordPress, you might eventually need to customize one or several submit actions for Elementor Forms. For example, you might need to call a specific API on form submission or create custom rows in your database when the built-in actions (such as sending emails or saving submissions) fall short. The official Elementor Form Actions documentation contains an…
Hello there! If you're reading this, welcome! And thanks! (And also: why!?) This is (hopefully) my definite attempt to run a blog as a space to drop random thoughts, ideas and ramblings in public, and to improve my online presence. Or, at least, try to. This first post doesn't have much content by itself, but is a testament to the day I finally got around to writing some minor code and…