The Terraria Server Odyssey: A Tour of Modern Deployment Options

A note from the co-author: This post was written collaboratively with Claude, who also did most of the actual infrastructure work — reading docs, writing Ansible roles, debugging crashed services over SSH, and talking me out of increasingly cursed networking solutions. When we hit the Fly.io memory wall at 2am, Claude suggested the boring VPS approach that actually worked. Fair to say this server wouldn’t be running without the assist. — Zac ...

February 1, 2026 · 5 min · 1037 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

Monorepos: The Secret Weapon Against Tech Debt

Monorepos: The Secret Weapon Against Tech Debt Hold on to your (code)bases, because we’re about to dive into the thrilling world of monorepos and their unexpectedly effective role in managing tech debt! Choose Your Fighter Monorepo: The One Repo to Rule Them All Monorepos are like a software development Swiss Army knife. In a monorepo setup, you’ve got one repository that manages all code and services with shared build tooling and common dependencies. It’s the Beyoncé of repositories, and it’s got a fan base like Google and Facebook, which definitely says something. ...

June 3, 2023 · 5 min · 855 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>