Things Break!
"It should just work" is a lovely little idea held by the deranged. After a few years cutting your teeth on any project you realize
- nothing ever just works
- and why should it?
Just experienced one of those lovely little issues where a "change that shouldn't effect anything" (preparing a separate subdomain for a distinct nginx server) caused a complete outage of the main site! Haha! Classic! And of course I, a fool, haven't set up any automated health checks so the failing https certificate was just hanging out for a few hours while I watched a movie with my wife. Ah well, nobody reads this stuff anyway except for the scrapers (I <3 seo).
Anyway, a confusing 20 minutes later I also had a great realization that the reason people pay supernerds to do this kind of stuff or just offshore to a SaaS company is that these web servers are finicky little trinkets that prefer to not be touched very often. The moment you start screwing around with doing stuff yourself you open yourself up to all sorts of things you wouldn't ever know (changing a wild-card port address match to be a strict IP address causes nginx to fail to route other wild-card addresses, like my primary site's landing page).
Some of you are calling me a Rookie, and yes, I am. None of this was possible for me to do in the few hours of spare time I have a week to tinker before deepseek. I can now slow roll my own deployment infrastructure and remote publishing site for my own software. "Just don't do it if you don't know what you are doing, RTFM" shut up, nerd, don't you have some PHP RFC to reject?
Move Fast; Break Stuff! It's ok, you can fix it.