Notes

Technical notes.

Notes from building and running my own systems. No advice, no marketing — write-ups of what broke and what came out of it.

Written by Patryk Piecyk: seven and a half years at a German company, five of them running its office, today my own systems and notes from keeping them alive. If you want to see how someone works, this is faster than a CV.

September 30, 2026 · 4 min read

An empty log meant two things at once. One good, one fatal

A job that reports back with a number must also be able to answer whether it measured anything at all. Otherwise its zero is only a promise.

September 23, 2026 · 4 min read

I wrote a manual for my own system. Twelve sentences in it were false

A manual ages without any symptom: the code compiles, the screen renders, and the text describes a system from five rebuilds ago. The only thing that caught it was counting commits.

September 16, 2026 · 4 min read

I encrypted my off-site backup and nearly made it useless

The password has to sit in the keychain for the job to run. And it has to live outside this computer for the backup to make sense. That's not a choice — those are two separate requirements.

September 9, 2026 · 4 min read

My monitoring stays silent. I built it so that silence would mean something

If the only proof a system works is the absence of an alarm, you don't have monitoring — you have hope. Silence has to be earned.

September 2, 2026 · 5 min read

My backup weighed 945 GB. My application code was not in it at all

A backup that runs without errors and a backup that protects the right data are two different things. I checked mine after four months.

August 26, 2026 · 3 min read

I counted how many of my API routes are really protected. Grepping by file lied

Searching a file for a function name answers the question "does this file mention it", not "is every entry point closed". Those are two different questions.

August 19, 2026 · 4 min read

The panel wrote "Saved" above content that was not in the database

An UPDATE that matched no rows finishes successfully. The database says "done", the panel writes "Saved", and the data is nowhere.

August 13, 2026 · 4 min read

My system stopped at 1 a.m. I found out in the morning, from a late report

A failure that does not report itself is worse than one that crashes loudly. Diagnosis and repair, written up from 1 July 2026.