Notice: Bandwidth Exceeded

August is ending, and yet today's high is going to be 28+°C, that unseasonable summer air in early fall.

With my fan humming away, I wrote yesterday about how, for the first time, I've exceeded my [free Netlify bandwidth](https://social.lol/@brennan/117162424319064228) of 100GB for the month, with five days still left to go. Everything is fine as of right now, but I've gone ahead anyways and wired up my homelab to be able to run this site, replacing the various functions and webhooks with MySQL databases and Caddy files in Docker. Containers stacked like a Jenga game.

And I'm sure I'll write a tutorial about the process in the future, since it would probably be useful for people to know how to migrate off of Netlify while still retaining the features the hosting platform provides.

There was an existential crisis during the procedure for me, though. I recall when I would simply write the words for a short blog post during my lunch break at work and post them to Medium.com—fast forward to now, and it's now *ingress, provisioning, blob storage, and webhooks*. Each day that I've tinkered with my website I've returned more and more to web development and programming—all with the hope that the additional functionality I've been adding has improved the experience and allowed more two-way communication.

I look at the `Caddyfile` and `docker-compose.yml` I have to write, and it makes me take a step back and question what I'm doing here at all. Though, that doesn't actually have anything to do with writing or coding, but rather the rest of my life in-between.

As you may be able to tell by the number of posts I publish and their typical length, I've devoted my life to this project. That sounds dramatic, but it is the truth—if I'm not at a screen researching or writing or debugging a local dev server, then I'm taking a break or sleeping. There is an ascetic quality to it. Sometimes I ask myself if I feel as though I'm missing out on anything, or if I shouldn't be putting all of my eggs in one basket, but I don't find myself wanting. I don't find myself lacking.

But there are consequences to this. Consequences I'm not proud of. The close friends I had in person but no longer have, for instance. I realized that many of my relationships had become too one-sided—that others were putting in far more effort than I was—and I made the call that it was shittier to let that continue than to be honest and end things. I have always been the kind of person to act impulsively, as though social acts were irreversible, and burn bridges that could be left standing.

I've also reached capacity in my bandwidth. In some ways, my bandwidth could be regarded as impressive—having the ability to write and create consistently for so long. But in many more ways, my bandwidth is s