Devops

Second Brain is a personal knowledge app I run in production. It holds notes, embeddings, and the source files behind them. For most of its life it ran entirely on Supabase — database, object storage, and auth, all in one place. That convenience is exactly what Supabase sells, and for a while it was the right trade. Then the bill started talking. The Bill That Started It The free plan was generous, and I had quietly outgrown it. The part that actually stung was egress. Every time the app pulled data out — and a knowledge app pulls data out constantly — I was being metered for the privilege. The numbers were not catastrophic, but they were the wrong shape: a cost that grew with usage, on data that was already mine, moving between services I was already paying for. ...

You have a static site — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You want it on a real domain, deploying automatically when you push. This post is the exact playbook I use to get a site from “works locally” to “live at yourdomain.com with zero-touch deployments.” The stack: a DigitalOcean droplet, nginx, and GitHub Actions deploying via rsync. The Full Picture Before getting into steps, here is what the end state looks like: ...

My entire blog pipeline runs through GitHub Actions. Push to main, it deploys to staging on GitHub Pages, I review it, then approve the production deploy to my DigitalOcean droplet. The system works great at a desk. But what about writing from a phone? What if I want to draft a post on the couch, fix a typo I noticed on the train, or ship a quick update without opening a laptop? ...

This site runs on Hugo, deploys to GitHub Pages for staging, and ships to a DigitalOcean droplet for production. The entire pipeline is a single GitHub Actions workflow. Push to main, preview on staging, approve, and it goes live. Here is exactly how it works, step by step. If you want to build something similar, this post is your blueprint. Why Hugo Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It takes Markdown files, applies a theme, and outputs plain HTML. No database, no server-side rendering, no JavaScript framework. Just files. ...