Welcome to HowToShipIt — practical how-to guides for developers: code, AI tools, and servers, explained step by step.
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Your VPS will fail. Not maybe — when. A bad kernel update, a corrupted disk, an rm -rf in the wrong terminal, or your provider losing a rack. If your only plan is “the host takes snapshots,” you don’t have a backup strategy — you have hope. This guide shows you how to set up … Read more
You refresh your site and instead of your homepage you get a single line: “There has been a critical error on this website.” No details, no clues, and possibly no wp-admin either. This is the WordPress critical error, and it means one thing: a fatal PHP error stopped WordPress from finishing the page. The good … Read more
If you write code for a living, the AI industry keeps handing you new APIs, new model access rules, and new billing tiers faster than you can pin them in your dependency files. This week the news skewed heavily toward developers: OpenAI put a classification-focused API into public beta and reshuffled its usage tiers, Anthropic … Read more
If you’ve written even one Express route, you’ve already used middleware — because in Express, a route handler is middleware. But most developers use Express middleware for months before they really understand what it’s doing. This guide fixes that. You’ll learn how Express middleware actually executes, the five types, the order rules that silently break … Read more
A year ago, every AI coding tool wanted its own instruction file. Cursor had .cursorrules, Claude Code had CLAUDE.md, Copilot had its own thing. If you worked with more than one agent, you maintained the same instructions twice and watched them drift out of sync. That mess has a fix now. AGENTS.md is a single … Read more
Session affinity used to cost money. Not any more. For years, the nginx sticky directive sat behind a paywall. If you wanted cookie-based session affinity — requests from one client consistently landing on the same backend server — you either paid for NGINX Plus or compiled a third-party module from source. Then, on 10 March … Read more
Still running your Vue app on the Options API? You’re not behind — Vue 3 supports both API styles, and the official docs present them side by side. But the ecosystem has quietly settled: most new libraries, job postings, and tutorials now assume the Composition API, and every Vue 3 Composition API migration story ends … Read more
Why this one is different On September 22, 2026, WordPress released version 7.1.2 — a single-fix security release for CVE-2026-87902, an unauthenticated path-traversal flaw in page-template resolution. Within hours of the release, attackers were probing for it. This is now the default rhythm for critical WordPress core bugs: the patch itself tells attackers exactly where … Read more
Node.js 26 is entering Active LTS this October, and Node 24 is about to drop into maintenance mode. That combination makes this the moment to plan your upgrade: if you move now, you do it on your own terms; if you wait, you end up scrambling when Node 24 stops getting routine fixes. The good … Read more
If you write code for a living, this was one of those weeks where the industry moved faster than your backlog. OpenAI turned its DevDay into an agent platform launch, Anthropic turned Claude Code into a moddable platform, and OpenAI quietly started watermarking AI-generated text for the EU. Here is the AI developer news that … Read more