From Music Player to Personal Infrastructure — After-hours software studio

after2am.dev

Published dispatches

19 entries / newest first

Part 6 — Nextcloud, Trusted Domains, and the Joy of Canonical URLs

If Docker teaches humility, Nextcloud teaches patience. By the time Nextcloud entered the picture, most of the infrastructure already worked.

Part 5 — The Day nginx Refused to Move

There is a special kind of confusion that only reverse proxies can produce. The symptoms were deceptively simple and eventually the culprit revealed itself.

Part 4 — The Battle Against CGNAT

There are moments in self-hosting where everything suddenly becomes very real. For me, that moment was realising my ISP had quietly placed me behind CGNAT.

Part 3 — Docker, Homeservers, and the Slow Descent Into Infrastructure

Every self-hosting journey begins with optimism. And eventually arrives at: “Why is localhost refusing to localhost?” For me, the infrastructure side began innocently enough.

Part 2 — The Moment a Desktop App Needed a Backend

At first, I tried to avoid it. Like many developers building personal tools, I instinctively resisted introducing unnecessary complexity.

Part 1 — I Just Wanted a Better Music Player

There is a very specific kind of frustration that slowly builds over years of using software that almost does what you want.

Series Overview

This series documents the very real journey of building a personal, self-hosted media ecosystem around Needle — a local-first music player that slowly evolved into something much bigger.

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