Engineering
Long-form essays on the patterns, primitives, and platform decisions behind the Mcaster1 ecosystem. Considered, opinionated, and grounded in production.
Celenite Stack
One C++ Binary, One PHP-FPM Pool, Zero Sidecars
How I built 8 production apps without microservices. A named architectural pattern combining a compiled C++17 core with PHP-FPM frontends — and why it runs equally well standalone, on Docker, or as a Kubernetes pod.
Read the full articleFrom `apt install nginx` to `accept()`
Owning TLS termination inside your daemon
A practical walkthrough of moving TLS termination out of the proxy layer and into the application daemon itself — OpenSSL setup, modern cipher suites, per-listener mTLS, and what you gain operationally by owning the socket from accept() to response.
View outlineStackSmith's Agent Fleet
A heartbeat-based control plane without service mesh
How 5 production OVH hosts heartbeat back to StackSmith every 60 seconds with host stats, container state, and Kubernetes telemetry — and why this design choice eliminates the need for a service mesh, a sidecar agent, and a separate metrics pipeline.
View outlineOne Process, Three Ports
The Mcaster1BackDraft WAF architecture
Why the WAF, the admin UI, and the REST API all live in the same C++ binary on different ports — and how this collapses the operational surface area of a typical microservice-shaped WAF deployment by an order of magnitude.
View outlineThe YPMan Atomic Table Swap
Zero-downtime directory updates without microservices
How a 10-stage internet-radio directory sync pipeline lives inside a single C++ daemon, and the single MariaDB RENAME TABLE call that gives the public yp.casterclub.com directory zero-downtime guarantees even when the upstream Xiph feed breaks.
View outlineCelenite Stack on Kubernetes
The same binary as a pod
A walkthrough of how Mcaster1StackSmith deploys identically as a systemd service on bare metal and as a single Kubernetes pod inside the cluster it manages. Helm chart anatomy, the emptyDir socket trick, and why the Helm chart is four manifests instead of fourteen.
View outline