Design Distilled

A running journal of our what we've learned in design and technology.


Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

No. 17

Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD
freebsd caddy devops

FreeBSD’s native support for ZFS snapshots and jails provides a powerful foundation for immutable deployments. By creating a new jail from a ZFS snapshot for every release, we get instant roll‑backs, zero‑downtime upgrades, and a clean, reproducible environment. This article walks through the (very opinionated) flow that we use. From jails setup through running Caddy as a health‑checked reverse proxy in front of the jails.

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Temporal Dev Server on FreeBSD

No. 16

Temporal Dev Server on FreeBSD
freebsd temporal

At Conrad Research we LOVE Temporal. It gives us a high velocity in development because our code doesn't have to worry as much about implementing retry logic. We are in the process of moving to a self-hosted Temporal server and as such we're starting with the baby step of setting up a Temporal CLI dev server to run on our FeeBSD deployment platform.

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Zed + Groq = Insanely Fast Coding Assistance

No. 14

Zed + Groq = Insanely Fast Coding Assistance
zed groq llm

Sometimes in life you stumble upon unexpected joy :) For me, it was recently Zed. After a couple of weeks, I was completely sold on Zed as my new IDE. Then one morning I was thinking about how insanely fast Groq’s inference is and it dawned on me: what if I could use Groq as my inference backend in Zed?

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CSS Nesting is Now Baseline Supported

No. 03

CSS Nesting is Now Baseline Supported
css

Nested CSS is now baseline; meaning that it's finally supported across all the major browsers. We've been playing around with it and have found it really improves readability of your CSS. Let's go through some examples.

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Add Security Headers on Cloudflare Pages

No. 02

Add Security Headers on Cloudflare Pages
cloudflare pages security

Securing Static Sites: Why It Matters

Wait! What? Securing a static site? Yup, even if your site only contains static content, it doesn't mean you're safe from vulnerabilities like Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and others. This becomes an even bigger issue if you've added forms or other interactive elements. The good news is that securing your site is straightforward.

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Hello World

No. 01

Hello World

"Hello World". The most profound two words in computer science. Really this post should be titled "Hello Again" as it represents my return to blogging after a decade of hiatus.

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