Weekly Log: August 20, 2025

👋 Hey,

Every Wednesday I share a quick recap of what I was up to last week — the projects I worked on, things I’m learning, what I’m reading/watching, and a few reflections. Last week was a mix of infrastructure tinkering and digging into legacy Microsoft tech. Here’s the recap:

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🔧 What I’ve Been Working On

• Migrated PAYTICK infrastructure from Digital Ocean App Platform + managed DB to a single VPS (with Netlify for frontend), while keeping a full Docker setup.

• Why? Cost savings. I already pay for the VPS for other projects, so reusing it made sense. It’s slower and won’t scale, but for now it’s perfectly fine.

📚 What I’m Learning

• Diving into WCF (yes, the old Microsoft technology). Needed it for a project, but curiosity made me go deeper.

🧠 Reflections

• Over-engineering MVPs makes them expensive and harder to maintain. Keep them simple and scale only when it’s truly needed.

📖 What I’m Reading / Watching / Listening To

• “The Pragmatic Programmer” by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas — I first read it 10 years ago, and revisiting it now, it still feels just as relevant because most of its lessons are technology-agnostic.

🎯 Next Week’s Focus

• Keep progressing on The Pragmatic Programmer

• Clean the new PAYTICK environment (rotate secrets, add docs).

– KA