Author Archives: ronaldpringadi

Block Countries by IP on Debian Trixie with nftables and xtables-addons

Debian Trixie uses nftables as its default firewall. If you’re used to iptables, the commands still work — but they go through an iptables-nft compatibility shim that translates them to nftables rules under the hood. For country-based IP blocking, the … Continue reading

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How to Set Up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) — Step-by-Step Guide

If you’ve been putting off setting up Google Analytics because you’re still on the old “Universal Analytics” (UA) — it’s time to act. UA is officially dead: Standard UA properties stopped collecting data on July 1, 2023 UA 360 (premium) … Continue reading

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Using PHP with Mustache: Practical Examples and Gotchas

If you want clean templates in PHP without pulling in a full framework, Mustache is a great fit. It keeps logic out of views, which forces you to prepare data in PHP first and makes templates easier to scan later. … Continue reading

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Scribe for Laravel: API Docs That Stay Fresh, and a Calm Way to Upgrade Them

Most Laravel teams reach a point where their API documentation is either out of date, written somewhere it shouldn’t be (Confluence, anyone?), or just doesn’t exist. Scribe is the package that quietly fixes this — it reads your routes, controllers, … Continue reading

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Three Years of the AI Boom: The Stocks That Ran

A short personal note on the 2023-2026 AI boom and the handful of companies whose stocks went vertical: NVIDIA, Palantir, Broadcom, TSMC, AMD, Microsoft, Meta. Continue reading

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Reading Laravel Config From a Queued Job — and the env() Trap That Bites You in Production

Today’s lesson came from a perfectly innocent-looking change in a Laravel app. We had a magic number — a chunk size — sprinkled across three call sites: 123foreach (array_chunk($userIds, 100) as $chunk) {     SendOnboardingEmailJob::dispatch($chunk); } One reviewer flagged … Continue reading

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When the third-party PPA goes down: replacing a Dockerfile with a pre-built image on Docker Hub

Three days, three CI failures, all rooted in the same place: the Dockerfile our build runs from rebuilds the world from scratch every single CI run, and every external source it touches is somebody else’s reliability problem. Here’s what that … Continue reading

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When a Composer package vanishes from GitHub: don’t panic, and don’t delete vendor/

Today our CI/CD pipeline went red on a job that hadn’t been touched in months. The .gitlab-ci.yml was untouched. The branch built fine yesterday. composer install exploded. The relevant chunk of the failure log: 12345678Failed to download acme/some-nova-tool from dist: … Continue reading

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Local HTTPS in 5 minutes with Caddy 🔒

I used to dread setting up https for local development. Self-signed certs got the browser to scream. Editing nginx.conf for two hostnames felt like building a cathedral. Caddy changed all that for me — it’s a tiny single-binary web server … Continue reading

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Spatie activity_log: which method writes to which column? 🐘

If you’re using spatie/laravel-activitylog, you’ve probably written something like activity()->event(…)->log(…) a hundred times without thinking about where each piece lands in the database. The fluent API is friendly, but the column mapping isn’t obvious until you go look — so … Continue reading

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