william_mantly
Backend & Infrastructure Engineer. I build things that run for 15 years untouched.
"Don't build systems so complex that you need a compiler to understand them. That's the real bug."
Origin Story
1999. WebTV. A physical Perl book. No computer.
I learned to code by typing Perl into an HTML textarea on a free web host, using a television as my monitor. No local execution. No error messages—debug was turned off. When something broke, I got a blank screen. That's it.
My debugging process: comment out every line, add an echo at the end, uncomment line by line until the echo disappeared. That was all I had. Google in 1999 just returned the Perl language specification—useless for a kid trying to figure out why his CGI script wouldn't run.
Eventually my uncle gave me a real computer: 50MHz CPU, 36MB RAM, 300MB across 4 hard drives. Heaven. I tried to install Linux, got it working, but couldn't figure out how to dial into AOL with it. Back to Windows—for a while.
Then broadband happened. Ethernet just works. No modem drivers. No proprietary dialers. I installed Linux again and never looked back. Daily driving Linux since 2006—through Debian, Ubuntu (until they lost their minds with Unity and snaps), Linux Mint on desktop, and back to Debian on servers where it belongs.
The hard road taught me to actually understand things. When you learn without error messages, without Stack Overflow, without an IDE—you learn to think about code, not just write it.
What I've Built
Self-hosted serverless platform. 24 languages, real Linux containers, instant public URLs, websocket terminals. Built what Replit does, years before they did it properly. Pre-warmed container pools, auto-scaling workers, $40/mo infrastructure.
OpenResty + Lua + Redis + Node.js control plane. Wildcard SSL via ACME DNS challenges, port-prepending subdomains, trie-based domain lookup. Add a host in the UI, works instantly. No nginx reload. Running 20 years across rewrites.
Custom OpenLDAP frontend. Invite links with UUID tokens, self-service password reset, group-based access control. Built after getting hacked over a temp password. What FreeIPA and Keycloak wish they were—simple and usable.
Full-stack framework for internal tools. Define a model, get REST API + real-time sync + auto-generated UI. Django admin energy for Node. No React. No TypeScript. No build step. Just Bootstrap and ship.
jQuery plugin for reactive lists. Angular's ng-repeat, extracted. Auto DOM sync on push/pop/splice. Published on npm. Because you don't need React to update a list.
Stack
Beliefs
- Simple systems that work beat complex systems that might work
- If you need TypeScript to understand your types, you named them wrong
- The best code is code you never think about again
- Unix got it right: small tools, text streams, compose everything
- 95% of apps need CRUD and a form. Build for that.
- Your $20 VPS can handle your entire total addressable market
- Debuggers are for code you don't understand. Understand your code.
- Scaffold for where the project is going, not just where it is