Dan Mercer

Software tinkerer · Linux & self-hosting enthusiast

Hi, I'm Dan Mercer. By day I keep small servers and web projects alive; in my free time I take apart things I don't understand and put them back together — mostly on Debian boxes like this one.

This corner of the internet holds my notes and the occasional write-up. Nothing fancy: a few static pages, served by Caddy, certificates that renew themselves, no tracking, no comments, no drama.

Recent notes

2026-09-18 · Keeping this website under ten kilobytes
What I cut to make every page a single, tiny request.
2026-06-30 · Three Caddy notes I keep re-learning
fmt and validate before restart; renewals are port 80 plus DNS; pre-compressed files.
2026-04-12 · A twelve-line backup habit
The dumb script that finally stuck.

Things I fiddle with

Small self-hosted services (and the ongoing fight with backups)
Shell scripts that are one bad idea away from being cron jobs
Reading other people's dotfiles