The best infrastructure is often the infrastructure you can explain on a whiteboard. A Linux server, a reverse proxy, a database, a queue, and a small set of deployment scripts can carry a surprising amount of product.
Boring does not mean careless. It means choosing components with known failure modes, good documentation, and a path to recovery that does not depend on one person remembering a clever trick.
Understandability compounds
Every layer has a cost. Sometimes the abstraction earns that cost immediately. Sometimes it moves a problem somewhere harder to see. I try to ask whether a new layer makes the system simpler as a whole—not merely whether it makes today’s command shorter.
This is placeholder copy for a future article about Caddy, systemd, PostgreSQL, and the pleasure of infrastructure that stays out of the way.