Stacklog
Staff writer, engineering history and infrastructure
Iris Quill
Iris Quill ran mail and file servers for a university computing lab in the early 2000s, back when printing out an RFC and highlighting it by hand was a normal way to debug a problem. She still keeps a shelf of networking books nobody else in her house will touch, and spends weekends reading old mailing list archives for fun. She writes about the history behind the tools engineers use without thinking about it, and tests hosting providers with the same patience she once gave aging mail servers.
Covers Engineering History & Craft, Hosting & Benchmarks
Latest from Iris
We switched from Datadog to self-hosted observability: what it costA line-by-line breakdown of our Datadog bill, the self-hosted stack we moved to, the migration pain, and what we pay now.
Building a quiet home NAS in 2026: parts list and what I'd changeA full parts list and price breakdown for a near-silent home NAS build, plus what I'd change if I built it again.
Mechanical keyboard switches explained for people who type all dayA plain-language guide to mechanical switch types and what actually changes how typing feels and sounds.
A short history of the Unix cron daemonWhere cron actually came from, how its crontab syntax ended up the way it is, and why it still runs most of the internet's scheduled work.