Web Development on ma.ttias.be

Running HTTP/3 with Caddy in 2026: it just works

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I wrote about running HTTP/3 with Caddy in 2020 , it was a ritual. You opted in with an experimental_http3 global option, the protocol was still draft h3-27, and to test it you needed a custom-compiled curl and a browser nightly with the right flags flipped. It worked, but it was clearly the bleeding edge.

QUIC and HTTP/3 in 2026: from Google experiment to IETF standard

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ten years ago I wrote about Google’s QUIC protocol , back when it was an experiment you could realistically only test against Google’s own servers. I was excited about it, and I ended that post hoping the spec would get standardised and show up in other browsers and servers.

Caching get_certificate lookups in Caddy

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At Oh Dear , our status pages can run on a customer’s own domain, and we’ve always served on-demand ACME certificates for them: someone points their domain at us, and Caddy provisions a Let’s Encrypt certificate for it automatically. We’re now adding a second option, letting customers bring their own certificate. For that, Caddy doesn’t provision anything; it fetches the certificate from an HTTP backend in our app.

Serving HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 with Nginx in 2026

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2016 I wrapped nginx in a Docker container just to get HTTP/2 working. Not because I love Docker, but because the server’s OpenSSL was too old to do ALPN, and the cleanest way to borrow a modern OpenSSL was to lift one out of an Alpine container. It worked, but it was a hack, and I knew it at the time.

Finding Dutch audio across streaming services

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We have 4 streaming services at home: Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, and Apple TV+. Try finding which films and series are actually available with Dutch audio.

How we implemented a mobile-friendly Oh Dear UI with AI

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We just shipped a mobile-friendly version of Oh Dear . It touched 226 files, added over 5,000 lines, and modified 160+ Blade templates. The PR took three weeks from first commit to merge.

Web development is fun again

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I remember when PHP 4 was a thing. jQuery was new and shiny. Sites were built with tables, not divs. Dreamweaver felt like a life hack. Designs were sliced in Photoshop. Databases lived in phpMyAdmin.

Oh Dear 2.0 launched

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 14:51:53 +0200

I couldn’t be prouder to showcase Oh Dear 2.0 , our all-in-one monitoring solution for websites. Over the past year, we’ve redesigned the entire service and have started implementing the designs. And now, it’s ready.

How do we find users for our SaaS?

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

After more than 2 years of building Oh Dear , I still struggle with the most fundamental question: how are users finding our application and where should we focus our marketing efforts to maximize that?

What else can you stuff in a certificate chain?

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently learned that quite a few (old) root certificates are going to expire, and many websites still send those along in the TLS handshake .

Selecting all checkboxes on a page with the Developer Console

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A quick reminder to myself that the Developer Console in Chrome or Firefox is useful to mass-select a bunch of checkboxes, if the site doesn’t have a “select all”-option (which really, it should).

Build & test your Laravel project via Bitbucket Pipelines

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post will show you how to use Bitbucket Pipelines to build and test your Laravel Project in a docker container.

Set up a custom 404 page for static sites with Caddy 2

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a quick example of setting up a custom 404 landing page if you use Caddy V2 to serve static sites, like this blog.

Someone, somewhere, is trying to break into your app

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s good to be reminded of the fact that the internet is, in fact, a pretty hostile place.

How to run HTTP/3 with Caddy 2

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 06:30:00 +0100

I just migrated this webserver to Caddy 2 and with it, enabled HTTP/3 support. This post will give a short explanation how you can do that.

Migrating to Caddy 2

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 06:00:00 +0100

Last week, the first Release Candidate of Caddy 2 saw the light of day. I don’t usually like to run production environments on beta software, but for Caddy I wanted to make an exception

Forcing a Content-Type header with Guzzle's form_params

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I just lost an hour or 2 of my life to this, so I figure I’ll do a small write-up to save future me from having to do the same dance.

I found a loophole to prevent those pesky cookie notices 👀

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Have you noticed how this page doesn’t have a cookie pop-up? Nothing to accept before you can read the content?

Adding a sticky table of contents in Hugo to posts

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Bram Van Damme recently shared a really cool method of showing a table of contents on a page and I’ve wanted to implement it on this blog ever since.

Making a JSON prettifier in pure JavaScript

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I toyed with the idea of making a JSON prettifier myself. I often use these to re-format and debug a minified JSON payload.

cron.weekly is coming back!

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time I wrote a weekly newsletter on Linux, open source & web development. Basically I wrote about the things that interested me.

A Caddyfile config example for Laravel

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using the Caddy webserver for all my projects lately. Here’s my current default config for a Laravel project.

Remove index.php from the URL in Laravel

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you have a Laravel project, you might be surprised to find your routes are probably available on a number of different URLs.

How to prevent content-spoofing in Apache's 404 error pages

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We had an interesting security report for our Oh Dear monitoring service . An attacker could load a specific URL and trigger a 404 page in which they controlled the output.

A step-by-step guide on migrating from WordPress to Hugo

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished the last bits of migration for this site. It involved moving my podcasts from the podcast.sysca.st domain to a dedicated overview on this site .