News — Writing & Research
What we're thinking about.
Engineering write-ups, platform comparisons, and notes from building production software since 2016.
-
OpenClaw vs Hermes Agent: Which One to Self-Host in 2026?
If you’ve decided you want a self-hosted AI agent — one that lives on your own server, remembers your work, and reaches you on Telegram or Slack — you’ve almost…
-
Self-Hosting Hermes AI Agent: Mac Mini vs. DigitalOcean VPS, Secured with Tailscale or ZeroTier
Quick answer: Hermes AI Agent (by Nous Research, MIT-licensed) is a persistent, self-hosted AI agent — and the two most practical homes for it are a Mac Mini on your…
-
When Shopify Goes Down: A Merchant’s Outage Playbook (Lessons from the June 3, 2026 Outage)
Shopify went down on June 3, 2026. Here’s exactly what merchants should do during a platform outage — and how to reduce single-platform risk for next time.
-
Laravel vs Symfony in 2026: Which PHP Framework for Your Next Application
Quick answer: most product teams should choose Laravel for speed to production; choose Symfony for long-lived, large-scale systems where strict architecture matters more than delivery speed. Here's the honest decision…
-
WordPress Security Hardening on Shared Hosting in 2026: A Realistic Guide
Quick answer: WordPress is not the security problem — your plugins are. In 2025, roughly 96% of all WordPress vulnerabilities were found in plugins, with most of the remainder in…
-
Node.js vs Ruby on Rails for SaaS MVPs in 2026
A practical comparison of Node.js and Ruby on Rails for SaaS MVPs in 2026 — time to ship, hiring market, operating cost, and where each framework hurts at scale. The…