Senior SRE, infrastructure builder, and occasional writer. Currently at Kaizen Gaming.https://marios.istos.dev/https://marios.istos.dev/blog/14-self-hosted-languagetool-ai-rephrase/https://marios.istos.dev/blog/14-self-hosted-languagetool-ai-rephrase/A practical guide to replacing Grammarly with a fully self-hosted, free setup: a LanguageTool server for grammar and spelling, plus an open-source gRPC sidecar that adds Grammarly's AI rephrasing feature on top.Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/blog/13-the-case-for-go-with-ai/https://marios.istos.dev/blog/13-the-case-for-go-with-ai/Go is the language I've fought least while building alongside an AI agent. The benchmarks mostly disagree with me. Here's the case anyway, with the numbers that cut against it left in.Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/blog/12-why-i-migrated-off-a-single-page-app/https://marios.istos.dev/blog/12-why-i-migrated-off-a-single-page-app/A Vue SPA felt fast for pcprice.watch. For 2 years it fired ads and analytics on one page per visit. Migrating to Astro cut the build from 26 min to 9 sec.Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/blog/12-ai-agent-vault-memory/https://marios.istos.dev/blog/12-ai-agent-vault-memory/I structured a PARA-style Obsidian vault so Claude Code never re-asks what my project does — CLAUDE.md rules, per-project index files, a compile-pass workflow, and agentmemory MCP hooks. 84% of devs use AI tools. Only 29% trust them.Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/blog/11-self-hosted-umami-on-heatwave/https://marios.istos.dev/blog/11-self-hosted-umami-on-heatwave/Vercel Analytics charges per event overage. Why I moved to self-hosted Umami on a free Oracle HeatWave instance — and three things that bit me along the way.Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/blog/10-cloudflare-tunnel-access-zero-ports/https://marios.istos.dev/blog/10-cloudflare-tunnel-access-zero-ports/Cloudflare Tunnel and Access run my Grafana, Umami, and internal dashboards with zero inbound ports — and per-path bypass lets the public bits stay public.Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/blog/09-zero-dollar-kubernetes-cluster/https://marios.istos.dev/blog/09-zero-dollar-kubernetes-cluster/The Terraform, k3s, and Traefik setup behind a 2-node Kubernetes cluster on Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier — 4 ARM cores, 24 GB RAM, $0/month.Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/projects/istos-dev-infra/https://marios.istos.dev/projects/istos-dev-infra/The 2-node Kubernetes cluster running this site and a handful of side projects, provisioned with Terraform on Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier for $0/month.Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/projects/buildero/https://marios.istos.dev/projects/buildero/Permit-monitoring SaaS for Greek construction engineers. Ingests permits from the Διαύγεια government portal, classifies them, and surfaces relevant leads.Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/projects/pcprice-watch/https://marios.istos.dev/projects/pcprice-watch/PC component price tracking across eBay marketplaces with automated data pipeline and intelligent filtering.Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://marios.istos.dev/projects/lingopop-quest/https://marios.istos.dev/projects/lingopop-quest/Browser extension for seamless language learning during web browsing using spaced repetition algorithms.Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT