Blog on aaron fas

Redesign #202603

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:56:58 +0200

Hey, hey, hey 👋

Let’s celebrate together the brand new redesign 🎉

Do you know what was the goal for the redesign? Simplification. I replaced the theme with something easier to manipulate. Thanks for all these years, manis 🫡.

📖 Internally the theme I made was nicknamed 'ximple'.

I don’t plan to update it drastically, but I do plan to evolve it. Heavily inspired by “Build the web you want to see” by James.

For future reference I am adding here a screenshot of what the site looked like before and after.

Git File Permissions and Mobile Sync

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0100

Hey 👋

I use a git repo as my personal wiki. I’ve written about this setup before: Vim (Neovim) on my computer, and recently I started using Obsidian + GitSync on my phone. It works surprisingly well, except for one thing that’s been driving me crazy.

Every time I sync from my phone, a script I use to generate the diary pages loses its executable permission.

After every change I make in my phone, the next time I open a new diary page in vim, an error happens. Then I run chmod u+x, and move on. Until the next change from the phone.

AI-First iOS Development From Scratch

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:00:00 +0100

Hey 👋

Last week I did something I never thought I’d do: I built a feature in an iOS app.

Some context: I’m a web developer. Backend preference. I’ve never touched Swift, never opened Xcode with intent, and definitely never worked on the Clay codebase (our internal iOS app at Automattic).

But I had an experiment in mind: how far can AI take me in completely foreign territory?

To make it interesting, I did this alongside Ryan — a colleague who’s an experienced iOS developer. Same feature, same timeframe. He used his expertise. I used… Claude.

We Are Not Going Back

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:29:00 +0100

Hey 👋

I was doing the dishes the other day and I had this realization.

We are not going back.

I don’t think we will ever go back to how we used to program. And it happened so fast that I didn’t even notice when it happened.

One day I was writing code. The next day I was… still writing code, but with AI. And then at some point it flipped. Now I’m mostly directing code. Reviewing. Prompting. Iterating. The AI writes most of it.

Fixing Vimwiki Link Format With AI

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:20:00 +0100

Hey 👋

I’ve been using vimwiki for years and there’s one thing that’s been bugging me the entire time.

You know when you select text in visual mode, hit Enter, and it becomes a markdown link? Well, mine weren’t that pretty.

When I’d select “Article: How to Buy a House” and press Enter, vimwiki would create:

[Article: How to Buy a House](Article:-How-to-Buy-a-House.md)

Ugh. Look at that URL. Article:-How-to-Buy-a-House.md. I hate it.

What I really wanted was:

How My Home Server Was Hacked

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 17:03:39 +0200

Hey 👋,

Last year I decided to reuse an old MacBook (early 2011) as a home server.

I installed a Linux distro (Ubuntu server) and added a couple of hard drives via USB.

The main purpose of it was to use it as some torrent box. After a quick investigation I installed qbittorrent-nox.

📝 qbittorrent-nox is a version of qBittorrent without X interface.

The same day, when I was about to go to sleep I heard some strange noise in my office. I entered the room and the source of the noise was the fan from the MacBook. Odd.

Optimizing PHP Apps in Dokku

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 10:42:05 +0200

I run all my webapps in a single Digital Ocean (link with referral) droplet (their fancy word for VPS).

When I started I had some issues: with builds requiring more memory and how to monitor a Dokku server to diagnose instabilities.

At some point my server randomly froze (and as such all my apps became suddenly unavailable). This is what I did to fix it.

The Problem

The problem was that my apps were spawning hundreds of PHP processes per app. I have a few of them, so the total number of processes skyrocketed very easily to thousands.

RSS Reader Using Hugo

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 09:42:22 +0200

Hey 👋,

inspired by this RSS Server Side Reader idea I created my own within Hugo.

Find it at /reader!

Why?

For the last year, I have been trying to find interesting blogs to follow. Every time I found one I added it to Feedly. That was nice, but if I didn’t check it in a while content would pile up.

After reading the aforementioned post, I thought that was a nice and simple idea. And I love nice and simple ideas so… I decided to implement it for myself.

I Like Pokémon

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 18:44:48 +0200

Hello 👋,

if you know me you know that I like Pokémon. But what’s surprising is that there hasn’t been any mention to it in my website until now! :D

Recently I visited Japan (my favorite destination ❤️ ), and while being there I challenged myself to get the 151 Pokémon cards from the first generation.

I succeeded 🎉! And to be honest it was easier than I anticipated.

Part of publishing more is growing this site with richer content like this. Hope you like it.

Publishing More

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 21:32:26 +0200

Hey 👋,

I want to publish more.

It is not that I don’t write, I write a lot in my personal notes and at work. But I rarely publish anything.

For a long time I justified it to myself as “not having anything worthy to write/say”. And it was true to a point. But it is not anymore, since long ago I started writing drafts whenever the tiniest of the ideas crossed my mind.

Increase Request Timeout on Dokku

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 07:56:43 +0100

Hey 👋,

For a project I’ve been working on recently I had to allow requests that took longer than 30s to complete.

I did my tests in local and everything worked, but when I went into my production server (using dokku): “503 Service Unavailable”

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>503 Service Unavailable</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Service Unavailable</h1>
<p>The server is temporarily unable to service your
request due to maintenance downtime or capacity
problems. Please try again later.</p>
</body></html>

That was unfortunate, but I remembered I had to deal with something similar a while ago.

Atomic Commits Using Partial Commits

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 12:52:31 +0200

Hey 👋,

I have been using Git for a long time, but never really focused on doing smaller commits until three years ago. When I joined Automattic.

I think there is a healthy obsession on doing granular commits with meaningful descriptions.

Since then, I have become much more conscious about doing just the change I have in mind, and working step by step. With a clear vision on why I am going every change I am doing.

Add Backlinks to Hugo

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200

Hey,

I have been reading and growing interest (no pun intended) on the digital gardening concept.

One of the key ideas I liked is that content is heavily interconnected. It makes sense, right? We are on the internet after all. Hyperlinks are great 🔥!

What follows is a quick overview on how I added backlinks to my Hugo site.

What are backlinks?

Basically it is a link to where some page is being linked from.

One API to Rule Them All

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 19:29:21 +0100

Hey, I’ve become comfortable with a specific setup for my personal projects. But realized that I ended up repeating many things on the backend.

I decided to create a single API (instance) to share between them.

My usual setup for personal projects

As a web developer I am, more often than not these projects are some kind of webapp.

I usually structure them by separating frontend and backend.

For the frontend I create a basic ReactJS app.

Make Vimwiki Open Links in Vertical Splits

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 21:47:06 +0200

Hey,

I found Andy Matuschak’s notes about taking notes (kind of meta hehe) super interesting.

But I was delighted by the interface his notes use to navigate. Go click on the link above and click on some of the links on the page to see what I mean.

So simple, yet so powerful! I didn’t know until now that I have always wanted this for my notes.

My current setup is using Vimwiki, and I am used to navigate through the links with the Enter key. But by default, it replaces the current buffer with the target page.

Monitoring Resources on Dokku

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 16:44:44 +0200

Hey 👋, if you want to monitor the resources in your Dokku server you are in the right place.

The last few days I had some CPU peaks that triggered some alerts in my DigitalOcean server. I didn’t know the source of this and I was surprised that I was basically blind to the resources that each of my Dokku apps were consuming.

I reached out to the Dokku Discord and it was clear that the kind of monitoring I was looking for is not something that Dokku wants to focus. They even have a blog post about that.

Align Middle Div to Center

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 18:26:42 +0100

Hey 👋,

recently I was working on Numynums and wanted to align three div to the center of the page in a very specific way.

Example of three divs aligned to the center.

As you can see above, the = symbol is exactly in the middle of the page. And the other two, are to the left and right of the = symbol.

It took longer than I expected, and I learnt something new so.. here it is for future reference:

Git Commit Automation With Neovim: Pull, Commit and Push

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 10:42:56 +0100

Hey 👋,

I think I have never mentioned it in here but I am a vimwiki user for a long time now.

Normally I use it from a single computer and I have had a cronjob that automatically does a commit and push every hour.

That was enough, but recently I am using a secondary computer and I have seen an hour was not frequent enough.

I changed it to run every minute, but I starting thinking if I could do anything better. And I did it with a simple script.

Fixing Invisible React App on Android Webview

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 13:10:50 +0100

Hey 👋,

recently I challenged myself to recover a project that was abandoned for a while: NumyNums.

It was a simple game built around 2014 (wow… 10 years already!) that I used as an experiment for another project of mine: WebWrapp.

So I rewrote the game, using React this time, and uploaded it to https://numynums.com (which I had to re-buy since it expired long ago).

It took me around three hours to bring it back to more or less the original status. I now plan on improving it, but that’s a story for another time. It’s there and it’s working 🚀.

Advent of Code (2023)

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 10:01:56 +0100

Hey 👋,

this is a quick update: this year I am participating in Advent of Code.

Who knows if I will complete it, but for the moment I am consistently solving the puzzles every day.

My solutions are written in PHP. Initially I wanted to do really elegant solutions, but now I am happy with just solving the puzzles :smile:

⚠️ The repository below contains my actual solutions to the puzzles. If you want to participate do not look at the solutions until you’ve tried by yourself.

Stop and Think

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 19:06:20 +0200

Hey,

this is not my usual article in this blog. It’s less technical and much more abstract than usual. Consider yourself warned.

Today I just stopped for a moment and thought. Did nothing else, just tried to consciously think.

This was after I found on twitter an image which basically gave three advises:

When you are confused, write.
When you are anxious, meditate.
When you are burnt out, take a nap.

Coincidentally, this happened right after a nap. And I unconsciously started thinking about that tweet.

What's The Difference Between an 'if' And a 'while'

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 08:42:02 +0200

Hey 👋,

if you are reading this it might be because you are a little bit confused about when to use if and when to use a while and what’s the difference between them.

If that’s the case, keep reading.

Story time

Some years ago I was helping a first-year Computer Science student with some programming tasks.

One of the main reasons she kept failing and failing on the exercises was because she didn’t know the difference between an if and a while.

Redirect www to non-www in Dokku

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 16:39:44 +0200

Hey 👋,

recently I have been trying to figure out why my site was not ranking very well for my own name.

A friend of mine suggested to check my site in ahrefs.

I had a pretty decent ranking (92%)… but I saw something strange with my canonical url: I was not redirect www to non-www.

How to redirect www to non-www using Dokku

After a couple of quick Google searches the answer was not obvious.

Dokku Performance Issues On VPS

Tue, 30 May 2023 22:44:39 +0200

Hey 👋,

long time ago I decided I was done with my shared hosting and wanted something new.

I wanted the solution to be able to run on a cheap VPS at DigitalOcean (link with referral).

I promise I plan to write a post about “how to migrate a site”, but I had this in draft first :)

What was my motivation?

As I said, I will go into more details about why I decided to do this and how I did it in a separate post.

Solution For Dokku App That Needs Restart

Sat, 27 May 2023 11:53:37 +0200

Hey,

I have been facing an issue with a Whatsapp bot I have running in Dokku (more on this in a next article!).

The node app got consistently stuck after every deploy. So I needed to restart the app manually after every deploy.

The app was actually starting, but the actual bot didn’t initialise correctly.

To restart the app I had to ssh into the Dokku server and run:

$ dokku ps:restart <app-name>

It has been months like that (in my defense I don’t do that many deploys there), until now!

AI Evolving Web Experiment Paused

Wed, 24 May 2023 22:39:09 +0200

Hey 👋,

recently I gave GPT-4 it’s own web page. And this is the article with the results of the experiment and why I decided to pause it.

I was consistently updating the site every 24h for around three consecutive weeks.

Then I got bored and stopped.

Psst!, if you want to see the whole conversation review the commit messages in the repository. For example, check this commit.

Limited Creativity: Repeating Pattern Appears

Honestly I don’t know what I was initially expecting, but after a few days it was obvious that the changes followed the same pattern.

I Gave GPT-4 Its Own Web

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 20:06:37 +0100

Hey 👋,

as you might know I have been using GPT-3 and ChatGPT recently.

After my previous test I decided to purchase a ChatGPT Plus subscription to be able to access GPT-4 as soon as possible and compare the results obtained with GPT-3 with the ones that GPT-4 would provide.

So I started thinking on a small project that I could ask GPT-4 to implement, and then… What if I gave GPT-4 it’s own web page and allowed the AI to iterate over it in any way it wanted?

Creating A Web From Zero With GPT-3 and ChatGPT

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 22:00:54 +0100

Hey 👋,

Like many others I have been experimenting a lot with GPT (and ChatGPT) recently and yesterday GPT-4 was announced.

I felt inspired by the demo they presented and decided to give it a try.

I thought that using the “old” GPT-3.5 would be a nice idea so I had a baseline to compare with.

Deciding the project was easy since I had this idea in my mind for a while.

Migrate Git repository from Bitbucket to GitHub

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 08:04:22 +0100

Hey 👋, recently I wanted to play with GitHub Actions and this blog (upcoming post :eyes:) and I realised that I had this repository still in Bitbucket.

So I decided to migrate the Git repository from Bitbucket to GitHub.

Here’s what I needed to do:

Made a fresh new clone of my Bitbucket repository to a new localtion

git clone --mirror <bitbucket-repository>

Removed the origin remote, so that we can set the new one from GitHub.

git remote rm origin

Went to GitHub and created the new repository (a private repository in my case).
Added the new origin remote from GitHub.

git remote add origin <github-repository>

Push everything to GitHub’s remote.

git push --mirror origin

Now, I went and ‘cloned’ the new GitHub repository to confirm everything was fine.

git clone <github-repository>

After confirming the new cloned repository has everything I removed the one we used for migration.

Some extra notes:

Setup MailHog and MAMP on macOS

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 08:53:38 +0100

Hey 👋,

recently I was in a hurry and I ended up usingthe traditional MAMP tool for macOS for a personal project.

This project involved sending emails, and I wanted to test what I was sending locally.

I knew MailHog so I decided to set it up in local. It was an easy thing, but not as straightforward as I would have liked.

Here you have the steps I’d have loved to find to configure MailHog and MAMP on macOS:

PhpStorm freezes while opening a project

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 07:47:38 +0100

Hey 👋, I have been trying to open a specific project in PhpStorm for a couple of days (I have to admit I was not trying that hard) and PhpStorm was systematically freezing.

PhpStorm went on a white screen for a long time and the cursor was stuck in the infamous rotating candy from mac OS.

Solution: In order to fix it I simply removed the .idea/ folder at the root of the repository.

Adding Likes to Hugo site

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 22:55:33 +0100

Hey 👋, inspired by Brent Roose’s blog I decided to add a like button to all my posts in this blog. It’s a static site generated by Hugo since 2018.

It’s a nice little project that involved:

Learning how to extend Hugo (and the template I am using) in the least disruptive way.
Do some vanilla JS.
Craft some very basic API that I can use to kickstart api.aaron.com.es (separate article is in the oven 🍞!).

Integrating with Hugo

Let me start by saying that it was a bit difficult to decide where to add this feature. Hugo allows for multiple ways: overriding sections, shortcodes, …

Pathfinding

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 20:00:25 +0200

Hi 👋, for the last months I have been working on my free time on an RTS game without a name: Unnamed RTS. I have been doing that while streaming and it has been, for the moment, a really great experience!

Investigation 🧠

We started from the beginning: learning the framework (Phaser) and the language (JS). But recently I have been working on something I find more interesting: pathfinding.

The first thing I did was checking if Phaser had something already included for that. It’s not an easy answer. Apparently it doesn’t and the way-to-go is to use an external library like easystar.js. But these libraries need a grid-based world and ours (for the moment) is not.

Streaming

Sun, 10 May 2020 00:19:11 +0200

Hi 👋,
apparently I have been a little busy this year and a half because that’s how long since my previous post here.
Let me be honest: I have never been really consistent with this “blog” but… wow!

Well, I just wanted to write here about my latest adventure, I am streaming on Twitch!

My main motivations are:

Practice my spoken english
Do more programming
Improve on public speaking

It has been more than a month (or even two) of trial and error but today I just reached 6 days in a row streaming and I am really happy for that 🎉 !

TLC #2 - Voidhead

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 16:48:01 +0100

Hi :wave:,
Second lunar challenge cycle completed successfully! :muscle: (more or less)

What did I do?

TL;DR:
Meditation app focused on being simple and extensible: Voidhead.

The journey

This is the second project I develop for my personal challenge. It is important to me because I show to myself I can continue this rhythm without compromising the rest of my life.

Finding the idea

This time it was pretty easy to find the idea. I have been in and out of meditation for a while and I always thought meditation apps are sometimes overcomplicated. Also I thought most of them are pretty aggressive regarding asking you for money and I felt like having a good meditation experience should be free.

TLC #1 - Quickopy

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 13:09:56 +0100

Hi :wave:,
I did it! First lunar challenge cycle completed successfully! :muscle:

What did I do?

TL;DR:
Tool to quickly allow to copy and paste from one device to another: Quickopy.

The journey

So, as you may know I started on Nov 23rd a personal challenge I named “The Lunar Challenge”. This is a quick summary of this first journey. If you want to know more about the project itself and are not interested in the journey jump to The Project section below.

The Lunar Challenge

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 18:08:28 +0100

Hi :wave:,
in my last post I said I was plannig to start a new challenge and that I would be sharing the details shortly. Let me present to you: The Lunar Challenge :rocket:

What is it about?

TL;DR:
I will deliver a different product every two weeks. Starting on November 23rd.
Longer answer:
Read the rest of the post :smile:

Motivation? Why now?

I have always wanted to start my own successful project. But I now realize I never did much in order to get it. And you might ask: why? Glad you ask…

Fighting lethargy

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 20:47:59 +0100

It has been almost four years since my last post. Wow… That’s tough.
Well, it’s not new. I have a tendency to yearly posts (New Year’s resolutions?). But this time, it has been not one but four of them.

And I am committed to make it change.

Why this? Why now?

So I have really had this feeling of telling myself to slow down for almost all my life. I have never liked to stand out and I always tried to just go by my life not making much noise.
I feel the need to clarify: I don’t think I am special or that I would have stood out if I wouldn’t have controlled me. I am just saying I feel I have being doing this for a looong time. And I do not want to do it anymore.

[es] Obsesionado con el tiempo

Tue, 30 Dec 2014 01:12:04 +0000

He estado releyendo el blog y he sacado algunas conclusiones:

Soy un tostón.
No cumplo lo que prometo (y eso que son promesas a mí mismo).
El blog no tiene nada que ver con la informática (que era la intención inicial).
Y, last but not least, estoy obsesionado con el tiempo.

Voy a explicarme. ¡No es que haya sido una sorpresa! Esta obsesión mía con el tiempo viene de hace ya mucho. Pero no sabía que fuera tan notable en este blog.

[es] Mirar hacia atrás.

Sat, 05 Apr 2014 02:19:30 +0000

El otro día me pasó algo curioso, fue casi como una revelación y quería escribir sobre ello. Así que lo he hecho, en medium. Quería también escribir algo en medium, y en inglés, así que de un tiro maté tres pájaros.

Básicamente lo que cuento es que me he dado cuenta que en ocasiones tenemos vergüenza (o miedo) a mirar hacia atrás en el tiempo y encontrarnos cosas que no sean de nuestro agrado. Y, sinceramente, creo que ese sentimiento es un gran error.

[es] Fin del período de exámenes

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 03:05:14 +0000

Por fin, y una vez más, el período de exámenes ha llegado a su fin. Como siempre ocurre con estas cosas, no veía la hora.

No sé si sólo me pasa a mí, pero he venido observando un efecto curioso a lo largo de mi vida como estudiante: con la llegada de los primeros exámenes, mi cerebro parece activarse. Se despierta. Algo en principio por lo que estar agradecido, pero no viene con la intención de echarme una mano con los estudios. Viene con ganas de juerga.

[es] La importancia de un buen nombre

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 01:21:52 +0000

Es una tarde cualquiera, estoy sentado en el sofá del salón y dedico toda mi atención a un juego que bajé hace poco en el teléfono. Súbitamente me doy cuenta de que tengo la televisión encendida.

Me llamo Drika Von Hauss, y soy buscador de tesoros.

Es un anuncio y esa frase en concreto a tenido la fuerza necesaria para llegar a mi cerebro a través de mis oídos y obligarme a prestarle atención. Y es que, con tal nombre, ¿cómo no iba a ser buscador de tesoros?

[es] Más de 365 días

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 23:14:39 +0000

Me avergüenzo al pensar que la última vez que escribí aquí fue hace más de un año. Más de 365 días con todas y cada una de sus horas, minutos y segundos. Aunque por otra parte es verdad que no ha sido un año en vacío. ¡He hecho muchísimas cosas! Algunas de ellas estaban en la lista de “objetivos” que me propuse hace más de un año, y muchas otras (la mayoría) que sinceramente creo que nunca me había planteado.

[es] Año nuevo, post nuevo

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:57:18 +0000

Aunque con un poco de retraso, me he decidido a escribir una lista de propósitos para año nuevo. Y diréis … ¡pues vaya novedad! Pero es que aunque sé que mucha gente hace este tipo de listas prácticamente todos los años (como si fuese la carta para los reyes magos: “Para este año quiero dejar de fumar, apuntarme a un gimnasio, estudiar más, …”) ésta es la primera vez que me decido a hacerla yo.

[es] Poco tiempo y muchos cambios

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:57:26 +0000

Cuando escribí el primer post de este blog sabía que sería el primero/último y en definitiva único durante un tiempo … porque es que no se me ocurrió un mejor momento para empezar con el blog que en pleno periodo de exámenes! (Olé yo!)

Al final, “parece” que he sobrevivido a la avalancha de exámenes y puedo decir que he terminado con ellos (al menos por un tiempo 😉 ) y ahora, que me sobra eso que antes me faltaba (tiempo), es cuando estoy empezando a asimilar algunas de las cosas que me han pasado en estas semanas …

[es] Primeras palabras

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:22:01 +0000

Siempre había creído que las primeras palabras eran importantes. Y no ha sido hasta que he empezado a escribir este primer post, con el que nace mi primer blog personal-profesional, cuando me he dado cuenta de que estaba equivocado y de que las primeras palabras son sólo eso, primeras palabras, como el prólogo de algunos libros que muchas veces la gente ni si quiera lee porque está impaciente de empezar con el primer capítulo.