I'm Paweł Holik — PHP/Symfony Tech Lead based in Toruń. 20+ years building web applications, currently leading backend at Droptica with Symfony, Sylius, Drupal, and Mautic.
Here you'll find posts about PHP, Symfony, Drupal, Docker, Linux, and my home lab.
My previous server — a Banana Pi running Debian — had served its purpose for years, but performance limitations and lack of support for newer technologies prompted me to upgrade. The main goal was to move to a container-based architecture and elimina…
The project started during a remote Sylius setup — configured entirely over SSH from a phone. The process was repetitive enough to warrant automating, so I put together a DDEV boilerplate. It got shared publicly before I considered it finished, so I …
This is the follow-up to my 2016 Let's Encrypt post using acme.sh and Apache. That setup worked, but running certificates by hand doesn't scale once you're managing multiple services in Docker. Traefik solves this entirely. Traefik is a reverse proxy…
This is a historical record of the setup I used in 2016 — acme.sh and Apache on Debian Jessie. It worked reliably at the time. For a modern approach using Docker and Traefik, see the followup post. Let's Encrypt had just left beta and was issuing fre…
You want to peek at something behind a registration wall — a PDF download, a demo, a forum thread. You don't need an account, you just need to get past the email verification. So you create yet another throwaway Gmail, wait for the confirmation link,…