🚀 I am excited to announce that I am now officially a Core Developer at @coolifyio! 🎉 Coolify has become my passion and I'm committed to taking it further than ever imagined. I am excited to shape the future of Coolify together with the community.

First donation is up, just gave $2,000 to @heyandras to support open source alternatives to Codex App and Claude Desktop 🫡 Also pumped that this can help with Coolify, the coolest open source hosting option for people exiting platforms like Vercel

It's been a while. Some thoughts about the last couple of months. I have a great blessing and a big curse at the same time. I want to be one of the greats. I don't just want to make software, I want to make the greatest software ever. In an age where AI code and slop dominate and slowly turn all software into shit, destroying the future stability, usability, and quality of software, this matters. But on the other hand, it feels like driving with the handbrakes on because everybody else is shipping full-on products with millions of lines of code in a week. For a few months now, I've been wanting to launch more products, build Coolify v5, and move faster while still progressing in life and learning new things. Instead of progressing, I've been getting slower, more tired, and for weeks now more and more stressed, always feeling like I'm falling further and further behind. At first I thought the reason was just that I want to do too many things in life. While that's true to some extent, it isn't the full story. The real issue is energy. To get more of it I started sleeping more, but I still felt tired every day. The actual problem was that I've been neglecting walks and workouts for months because I wanted to focus on work and ship more, but that was the biggest mistake I could have made. Energy vanishes and everything slows down with it. Everybody told me so, I know. But the world we live in makes it so easy to get comfortable. Every time one small goal is reached, it widens and 50 new ones appear, never really living the current moment, always chasing the next thing, trying so hard to move faster that everything else gets skipped. So this week I'll focus on building new habits, doing regular workouts, and organizing the 1000s of TODOs for my upcoming product launches, Coolify v5, and more, so I can hopefully work my way out of this vicious circle I've been stuck in for the last few months.

2026 Development Log 73 & 74 🚀 👨‍🍳 Core Coolify Development ✅ Fixed a Postgres cannot be restored error with my new standardized backup implementation by excluding the superuser, which has some other benefits too ✅ Started MySQL and MariaDB backup and restore commands modernization and optimization ✅ For over 3 days now, I have been running compression benchmarks to collect data to support my compression algorithm decisions ✅ Found one issue with how I wanted to do compression, as it uses all cores 100% by default, which is not optimal ✅ Reran some tests with a more accurate size calculation ✅ Fixed 1 dev related issue directly on next ✅ Updated upgrade maintenance email wording and numbered the steps 🛠️ Miscellaneous ✅ Read up on many social posts and made sure I am up to date 🩹 Health ❌ Skipped my walk

2026 Development Log 71 & 72 🚀 Today I opened 2 PRs for v5 that need to go into v4. One is the maintenance email and holy, it looks so good (fyi the date is not real). 👨‍🍳 Core Coolify Development ✅ Opened 1 PR that adds inactivity management (users and teams) which will be needed during the v4 to v5 upgrade ✅ Opened 1 PR with super clean email templates and a command to send the v4 to v5 upgrade maintenance notification ✅ Started benchmarking and testing compression and the standardized backup on a real server ❌ Tried to create realistic compression comparisons but failed because my test file was generated poorly (volume too small, all random, then 50% random...) ✅ Merged 2 PRs that fix 2 bugs into next ✅ Provided a lot of support on Discord 🏔️ PeakOSS ✅ Did more research about post-quantum cryptography ✅ Started researching and learning some initial motion graphics for my upcoming product launches 🛠️ Miscellaneous ✅ Read and watched a few videos to get up to speed on the latest news, new Laravel versions, and more 🩹 Health ❌ Skipped my walk

2026 Development Log 69 & 70 🚀 👨‍🍳 Core Cooliy Development ✅ Found clean solutions for multiple issues I discovered when testing the new standardized backups and planned solutions for them (adding them tomorrow) ✅ Wanted to fully implement the second backup PR with backup signing but found some blocking issues with signing ✅ Fully thought through and researched v5 databases with encryption, database users, database and app connections, new database backup UI and more (need to write it down soon 😅) 🏔️ PeakOSS ✅ Did a lot of research about existing file signing tools and checked for ways to improve them ✅ Did a lot of research about cryptography in Rust and Zig ✅ Did a lot of additional research into post-quantum cryptography especially in Rust ✅ Wrote down a complete plan with everything that is still needed and also estimates of how many days that will take to finish v3 of my VS Code extension ✅ Continued planning an announcement for something big happening in a couple of weeks 🩹 Health ❌ Skipped my walk

Hello?

2026 Development Log 68 🚀 👨‍🍳 Core Coolify Development ✅ Continued my backup PR development and finalized the new Postgres backup and restore commands ✅ Finished reading over 4 Postgres docs pages covering all backup options and which newly available options we should also include ✅ Read over all MySQL and MariaDB docs pages for all backup options and which new options we should use for all future backups, and it is a mess ❌ Tried to figure out 1 clean format to use for MySQL and MariaDB to cleanly backup and restore all new backups and there is no clean way lol ✅ Found the cause for a long-standing local development issue where apt and apk package downloads where failing - its was my VPN ✅ Did a lot more research and planning about how to cleanly and consistently name and store the new backups with the signature and manifest file 🩹 Health ❌ Skipped my walk

2026 Development Log 67 🚀 👨‍🍳 Core Coolify Development ✅ Improved my backup PR by switching zstd compression to level 12 and also making it use all threads, which is much faster and provides even more compression ✅ Did a lot of docs reading to improve backup and restore commands further ✅ Did a lot of research about compression, how it works, and which is the best option (xz, zstd, or one of the many others) ✅ Did a lot of initial research about backup file encryption and how to handle it in v5, making sure it is easily compatible with the new backup format of v4 ✅ Did a lot of research on backup signing and backup file checksum verification for tamper-resistant, verifiable backups which are even verifiable outside of Coolify ✅ Made a full implementation plan for implementing signing for all future v4 backups (makes a lot of sense now so v5 can support signed backups only) 🩹 Health ❌ Skipped my walk

2026 Development Log 66 🚀 Today I made massive progress on the standardization of the backup feature - some v5 code which is coming to v4 very soon. 👨‍🍳 Core Coolify Development ✅ Found an even better way to standardize backup formats, as I found some issues with the existing simpler backup restore commands I wanted to use. ✅ Modernized backup and restore commands a lot, most of them are now 1 line long instead of 5 and much simpler to maintain and use. ✅ Improved the overall backup process by using parallel dumps for Postgres and also switched all backups to zstd for better compression, which compresses even faster than the currently used gzip. ✅ Improved many other little things with the current v4 backup approach after a lot of thought and research, like new backup file naming and more. ✅ Read through the full Postgres backup docs and all backup-related Postgres CLI commands to finalize and correctly modernize the backup and restore commands. 🩹 Health ❌ Skipped my walk

2026 Development Log 64 & 65 🚀 👨‍🍳 Core Coolify Development ✅ Built and opened a v4 PR that standardizes v4 backups for easier migration to v5 and many other benefits ✅ Did a lot of testing on the changes of the backup PR ✅ Built and opened the v4 Docker Swarm deprecation PR - this will help with v5 migration as most users will no longer be using Swarm ✅ Started working on a 3 PR that will target v4 and it will prepare one more existing thing for v5 migration ✅ Started working on some parts of the upgrade migration logic of v5 🏔️ PeakOSS ✅ Planned out new ignore file icons for my VSCode extension 🛠️ Homelab ✅ Did a lot of research and calculations for my new email system with much better privacy ✅ Did some research, testing, and planning for a new password manager setup 🩹 Health ✅ Went for 2 walks

2026 Development Log 63 🚀 👨‍🍳 Core Coolify Development ✅ Did some more in-depth testing with permissions and how to handle them on the frontend 🏔️ PeakOSS ✅ Completely rewrote the whole core of the VSCode extension - turned from just modernizing into a complete rewrite ✅ Built out a new release process for the extension - the same one we will use for Coolify v5 ✅ Improved local testing of my VSCode extension a lot ✅ Installed and configured new modern dependencies for v3 of my VSCode extension - tsdown, svgo and so on ✅ Searched hours for some icons and went insane as the JetBrains icon naming is often so bad that finding an icon is super hard ✅ Planned out more open TODOs that are still needed for v3 of the VSCode extension 🩹 Health ❌ Skipped my walk

2026 Development Log 62 🚀 Yesterday and today, I spent some time catching up on all the things I missed during my week off, and I also released v0.3 of Anti Slop today. v0.3 adds 3 new checks and massively improves the compiled action size. 👨‍🍳 Core Coolify Development ✅ Read up on a lot of Discord messages ✅ Provided some Discord support 🏔️ PeakOSS ✅ Finished v0.3 of Anti Slop and released it ✅ Started working on v0.4 of Anti Slop as one of the fixes/features is not fully working ✅ Started working on v3 of the VSCode JetBrains icons extensions - removed a lot of code, modernized dependencies and more 🛠️ Miscellaneous ✅ Updated some settings on some of my GitHub repos and my GitHub account ✅ Deleted some unused forks from my account ✅ Updated the TSConfig reference file I use for all my projects 🩹 Health ❌ Skipped my walk