đ From Celeron Grit to Container Grit: An Indie CTOâs Pipeline Resurrection
A quick nod to my October 2024 post where I wrote about a resurrection; a spark of revival just a week before I joined my current role. After that, almost a year of quiet, no major moves, just the hum of the background. But now, here I am, with something serious finally done. This post is the story of that journey: from stillness to momentum, from a borrowed MacBook Air to a fleet of blazing-fast containers. Itâs about persistence, evolution, and the indie CTO spirit that never quits.
đ°ď¸ The 2020/21 Reset: When Constraints Forge Ingenuity
Thereâs something about being between jobs, in the thick of a global pandemic, with nothing but a battered Celeron and 4GB of RAM to your name. Itâs the kind of scenario that strips away comfort and leaves you with raw, unfiltered curiosity. In 2020, that was my reality. My main laptop was out of commission, and the world was on pause. But the mind? It was anything but idle.
With limited hardware, I found myself rewriting the core of crispâs pipelineâfirst in C++, then in C. The process wasnât just about porting code; it was a paradigm shift. When youâre forced to squeeze performance out of every byte and cycle, you start to see the pipeline not as a static sequence, but as a living, breathing organism. Every inefficiency is a bottleneck you canât afford. Every optimization is a small victory. đ
đť The Pipeline, Reborn: MacBook Air and the Spirit of Iteration
Fast forward to today. The worldâs a little less uncertain, and Iâve managed to borrow an old MacBook Air. The spirit of those Celeron days hasnât fadedâitâs evolved. I dove back into the pipeline, resurrecting crisp in a new form. Itâs not a full revival, but itâs a leaner, meaner, and much faster beast.
The improvements werenât just technical. They were philosophical. I stopped chasing perfection and started chasing velocity. The codebase became a playground for experimentation, and the results speak for themselves: what was once a sluggish process now flies. âď¸
âąď¸ The 200ms Wall: Lessons in Scheduling and Maturity
Back in 2020, my biggest headache was how to run a containerized process every 200ms. CRON, with its one-minute granularity, was a non-starter. The obvious answer was a continuous loop, but as any seasoned engineer knows, the devil is in the details.
At first, I obsessed over the loop itselfâhow to keep it efficient, how to avoid drift, how to gracefully handle errors. But as I matured, I realized the real challenge wasnât just technical. It was about understanding the system as a whole: resource contention, process isolation, and the subtle art of not over-engineering. đ§
đ Todayâs Benchmark: Sub-100ms on a 1vCPU, 512MB VPS
The bar has moved. Now, the goal is sub-100ms execution, running on a humble 1vCPU, 512MB VPS. And not just one containerâfourteen, in parallel. The constraints are tighter, but the ambition is bigger.
What changed?
- 𧚠Resource Awareness: Every container is ruthlessly optimized. Memory leaks are hunted down. CPU spikes are flattened.
- đĄď¸ Process Isolation: Each pipeline runs in its own sandbox, minimizing cross-talk and maximizing reliability.
- đ Observability: Metrics and logs are first-class citizens. If something lags, I know about it before users do.
- đ Continuous Improvement: The pipeline is never âdone.â Every week brings a new tweak, a new insight, a new speed record.
⥠Indie CTO Energy: The Takeaway
If thereâs a lesson here, itâs that constraints are a gift. They force you to think differently, to innovate, to grow. Whether youâre hacking on a Celeron in the middle of a pandemic or orchestrating a fleet of containers on a shoestring VPS, the spirit remains the same: relentless curiosity, ruthless efficiency, and a refusal to settle.
So hereâs to the indie CTOsâthe ones who build, break, and rebuild. The ones who see opportunity in adversity. The ones who know that sometimes, the best way forward is to resurrect the past, one line of code at a time. đĄđ¨âđťđĽ