Articles in 2026

Writing good articles takes time. These days, a lot of that work gets scraped, repackaged, and redistributed elsewhere with zero context and zero benefit to the original author. That does not mean I stopped building. It just means my focus moved.

A few years ago I wrote about a simple idea: instead of maintaining huge fail2ban regexes for every weird scanner path, let your Laravel app return a very specific HTTP status code when a request clearly looks like automated probing, then let fail2ban ban the IP based on that status code.