Unboxable in Tech: Eight More Exhibits From Career to Cloud Bill
In this Unboxable follow-up, a developer maps his career as a graph, bridges WordPress to static sites, and cuts a botnet-inflated cloud bill by 96%.
This installment of the Unboxable series gathers eight more 'exhibits' from a developer whose career resists neat categorization. Realizing a linear résumé misrepresented his path, he builds a graph model of skills and roles connected by edges, arguing the problem was never the content but the visualization. He applies the same instinct to his workflow, writing a WordPress bridge plugin that pushes posts to Hugo, Astro, or Jekyll instead of abandoning WordPress outright — landing in the top 7% of a GitHub Copilot CLI challenge.
A similar pattern shows up with dev.to: lacking historical stats, he starts with local SQLite scripts and evolves them into a full analytics stack using FastAPI, PostgreSQL with pgvector, and Streamlit, running containerized on his own VPS with Copilot CLI as a coding partner. When a cloud bill spikes unexpectedly, he traces it to a Polish botnet hammering unnecessary endpoints rather than real traffic, and cuts costs by 96% simply by closing needless exposure.
Finally, a one-off WordPress-to-Hugo migration script quietly becomes a real pipeline across repeated migrations, handling content extraction, image mapping, and redirects — the unglamorous work that outlives the initial demo. The throughline across all these projects: question default assumptions before discarding tools you're fluent in, and look for what's actually broken instead of chasing what's fashionable.