Self-Hosting

The newsletter moved off Cloudflare Workers and onto the mail server in a day: one Rust service, a Postgres with four tables, addresses sealed at rest, and a record of which issue went to whom. Why a mail store as a database was the right workaround in February and the wrong one now, what the move cut from the attack surface, and what the research on LLM-written code says about doing this with a coding agent without the complexity creeping back.

This blog now has real user monitoring: page views, web vitals, errors and which links get clicked, sent to an OpenObserve I run on my own server, only after the reader says yes, and sampled before a byte of the SDK is downloaded. Why a writer wants feedback at all, what the responsible-innovation framework says to leave out, the alternatives I looked at, and the day it produced six measurements of the same files for every one of a reader.

Three months of running a self-hosted newsletter: double opt-in with no database, why one-click unsubscribe forced me to stop using my mail server's fan-out, and an RFC 8058 DKIM requirement that ends in an anticlimax.

This blog's newsletter ran on a Rust Cloudflare Worker and my own Stalwart mail server, with no database and nothing paid for, until September 2026, when it moved onto the mail server itself. What the system looked like after a year of fixes, the DNS records that keep it out of the junk folder, what Hacker News gets wrong about running your own mail, and why a newsletter is a pipeline in the knowledge-diffusion sense.

Why the blog runs on Zola, what Zola refuses to do, and how that one refusal decided the shape of everything else: a Rust CLI that owns citations, PDFs, audio and the newsletter, every generated file committed to git, and a build that is one script. Read through organisational path dependence, with four things I would do differently.