Prajwol Shrestha

Every time a feature had the word "real-time" in it, my brain would jump straight to WebSockets. It felt like the right, serious, production-grade choice. Turns out, it's often overkill. And understanding why has changed how I think about building things. The Question Nobody Asks First Before anything else, ask this: Does the client need to send data back to the server through this connection? That's it. That's the question.

I recently decided to host one of my Dockerized Node.js apps on a VPS using Oracle Cloud Free Tier - not just to deploy it, but to understand what’s actually happening under the hood. I wanted to learn: How to create and configure a compute instance How Docker behaves on a VPS Why backend ports shouldn't be exposed directly How NGINX fits into the picture What restart policies actually do Here's exactly how I set it up - and what I learned along the way.

Chrome extensions are one of the fastest ways to ship useful software. They’re lightweight, powerful, and force you to think in clear boundaries. This article walks through how to build a Chrome extension using modern tooling, and how to automate versioning and releases using GitHub Actions.