Max Ratmeyer's Blog

This past weekend, my friend Akash and I attended Unihack, an international hackathon with a focus on solving civic issues. I've never attended a hackathon, so this was all new to me, but this was Akash's fourth hackathon. Going in, I was looking forward to building another project and playing around with some web development.

DNS records are a pain to manage. Each provider has its own UI, it's hard to make changes to multiple domains at once, and you can't easily revert changes. A few months ago, I was researching some DNS management tools and I came across DNSControl. DNSControl stores all of your DNS records in a single JavaScript file and saves it in git, and lets you deploy your records to production in one command.

Last Friday, Cloudflare had a major outage which took down a good portion of the internet for about half an hour. While Cloudflare is an awesome service and they have a generous free tier, it begs the question whether so much of the internet should be centralized under one company, so I wanted to see what it would take for me to make my own CDN.

When I was building this blog, one of the decisions I had to make was where to host my media. One of the options is to just upload everything to my GitHub repository and deploy it along with the site, but that wouldn't be efficient because Git isn't built to handle tons of media. I also wanted to manage my media and photos separately from my GitHub website repository, so I went with Amazon S3, Amazon's object storage service.

For a while now, I've wanted to build my own website and blog. The past few years, I've had a generic HTML5Up template up on my domain saying "Coming soon," which has been an ongoing joke to my friends because it has said the same thing for years.

One piece of cybersecurity advice that comes up time and time again is to use a VPN. VPNs, or virtual private networks, encrypt the internet traffic between you and your VPN provider, securing data from your internet provider and local network as well as hiding your IP address. Through clever marketing, VPN providers position themselves as an all in one tool to secure yourself online. However, the reality is a lot more complicated.