Allan Vital
Allan Vital — Software developer
Self-hosting, Java development, and open source projects.
allanvital.comAllan Vital writes about Java development, self-hosting, and the pragmatic side of open-source software. His posts cover the tools and decisions that working developers face daily — from setting up self-hosted infrastructure to navigating the human side of engineering teams. The blog is straightforward and practical, written by someone who builds things and wants to share what he's learned along the way.
Written by Allan Vital.
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English
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Recent posts from Allan Vital's RSS feed.
Architecture of a URL Shortener
I haven’t been following many YouTube channels lately, but one that always leaves me satisfied whenever I watch is Renato Augusto’s channel. Recently, I watched the video he made about URL shorteners. Overall, it’s hard to argue that his solution is probably the best possible given the problem’s premises: Functional Requirements: URL Shortening: given a long URL -> return a much shorter URL URL Redirection: given a short URL -> redirect to the original URL Non-funct...
DNSao - Quick and Private DNS Forwadder
Just a quick post to show one of my latest projects, DNSao. After running Pi-hole a few years as my home dns server, there were two things that bothered me in how it worked: no way to send queries upstream in a private protocol: pi-hole is great for blocking unwanted dns queries, but it only supports open udp queries to upstream servers. That means that your ISP (or any middle agent) can sniff your queries, they are plain to be checked.
Migrating from Jekyll to Wordpress
After a few years maintaining a blog in Jekyll (not this one, this one is in Hugo), I started wanting to migrate to WordPress on a VPS. The reasons were many: the blog started growing in the number of posts, which made writing new ones more sluggish, due to Jekyll’s slowness and the lack of motivation that this slowness causes a feeling of “immobility” from Jekyll, almost as if it isn’t evolving anymore
Do what you need to do: The importance of doing the basics with excellence
A while ago I had an acquaintance who joined the company where I worked as a backend developer. As a member of a team I was closely associated with, I observe how well he performed in some tasks. No one designed workflows like him, and his communication with the business area was excellent. He was loved by the entire team because he was always very present, always very willing. However, some members of his team expressed concern because he seemed to avoid more technical tasks.
The Trap of Toxic Positivity
A few weeks ago, a post went viral on LinkedIn: A company had the idea of firing an employee in a humane way, with a decorated basket of treats and words of appreciation. Many people criticized and opposed this attitude: How does this help a professional in such a delicated situation? These are very pertinent criticisms. The idea of a management that treats employees well is important, leaving in the past the rigid hierarchical concept, but there is a limit.
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If you work with Java and care about self-hosting your own tools, Allan writes with the practical clarity of a developer who's done the work and wants to save you time.