You might or might not know that this blog is hosted on a small single board computer in my basement and until recently I’d write or edit my posts, rebuild it locally and then push the built files up to the server hosting the static files. Works, but cumbersome and I’d frequently push drafts by accident. Not a big deal since drafts are also in Git, but still, unprofessional. But the beauty of a homelab is that you can automate things with as much or as little effort as you want. And automate I did.

So recently, against my best judgement, I’ve started working on a new project. The classic “how hard can it be?” kind of thing. What that actually is is not important right now. More important are the tech choices and how I shifted my opinion on generated code.

The tech stack I went with is what I usually pick; go for backend, pgx and sqlc for database access, htmx for frontend matters. I found managing Go’s template/html always a bit fiddly and wanted a better way of dealing with nested components and being able to render them individually. I have seen templ recommended many times and because it was a new project, I gave it a try. Initially I felt having yet another tool that generates go was weird, but after a few components I was sold.

Hugo has a really way of hooking into the rendering process that I’m using to automatically generate scaled down thumbnails of referenced images. I structure each blog post as a page bundle and render images via ![](image-name.jpg) in the markdown files. By default, hugo will render an image tag with the full sized image which can be rather heavy if it’s a large image. So instead, I set up a render hook for images in layouts/_markup/render-image.html:

In an effort to understand Postgres better I’ve worked my way through how a Postgres database is structured and executes queries.

Process Model

Postgres uses a process-per-worker model. That means every connection is handled by a separate operating system process forked off the initial process.

Subsystem Overview

Postgres consists of several components that all work together to process data and ensure it’s reliably written and can be looked up efficiently. The following are the most important components, but there more, other components that are beyond the scope of this post.