Bucharest · open to interesting problems

I keep Linux fleets running by day and ship products by night.

I'm Dragos Balota — sole DevOps engineer for large demo fleets in the cloud, writer at bitdoze.com, and the face behind @webdoze on YouTube. Everything I publish is verified hands-on first.

See what I've built Read my writing
// find me online
dragos@homelab: ~

$ whoami

dragos — devops engineer · blogger · maker

$ cat stack.txt

ansible · gitlab-ci · docker · linux · cloud

$ uptime

shipping by day, building by night

$ ▊

01 · About

Operator first, writer second.

Everything I ship — code, articles, videos — follows the same rule: verify it hands-on first, then explain it plainly.

By day I'm the sole DevOps engineer responsible for large Linux demo fleets in the cloud — provisioned with Ansible, shipped through GitLab CI, and kept honest by the network layer underneath. One engineer, whole fleet: automation isn't a nice-to-have, it's the only way it scales.

By night I write at bitdoze.com about web development, AI, DevOps, and self-hosting, and produce videos for @webdoze. Articles are never speculative — if it's on the blog, I ran it, broke it, and fixed it first.

The rest of the time goes into building products with TanStack + Convex, wiring up AI agents with Mastra and Agno, and self-hosting everything that stands still — Dockerized behind Caddy, backed up to S3.

02 · Stack

Tools I actually use.

No trend-chasing — each of these earned its place by surviving real workloads.

DevOps — the day job

Sole DevOps engineer keeping large Linux demo fleets alive in the cloud.

Ansible GitLab CI Linux at scale Networking Cloud Infra Bash

Web development

TypeScript-first stack for the blog and every product experiment.

Astro TypeScript TanStack Router/Start Convex Tailwind CSS

AI & agents

Building agent systems that write, research, and edit video — not demos, tools I actually use.

Mastra Agno LLM tooling RAG pipelines

Self-hosting

A server full of containers, reversed by Caddy, backed up to S3. If it can be self-hosted, it will be.

Docker Dokploy Caddy Compose S3 backups

03 · Projects

Things I've built and keep building.

A mix of publications, open-source, and product experiments — all in active rotation.

flagship

bitdoze.com

My blog on web development, AI, DevOps, and self-hosting. Every article is verified hands-on before it ships — real commands, real failure modes, real costs.

Astro Tailwind Content

@webdoze on YouTube

Video companion to the blog: walkthroughs, tool reviews, and build-alongs for developers and self-hosters.

Video Tutorials

bitdoze-astro-theme

The Astro + Tailwind theme powering bitdoze.com, extracted into a reusable starting point.

Astro Theme Open source

Agent tooling on Mastra & Agno

A growing stack of agents that handle research, writing assistance, and video production end-to-end — scheduled, memory-aware, and wired into my own infrastructure.

Mastra Agno TypeScript

TanStack + Convex apps

Product experiments with TanStack Router/Start and Convex — full-stack TypeScript from route tree to realtime backend.

TanStack Convex Full-stack

Self-hosted platform

Docker Compose stacks behind Caddy on a wildcard DNS: every internal tool gets a subdomain, a container, and an S3 backup job.

Docker Caddy Dokploy

04 · Writing

Latest from bitdoze.com

Hands-on articles — verified before they're published.

Browse all articles

05 · Now

What I'm up to right now.

A living snapshot — updated whenever the focus shifts.

  • Writing: Hands-on articles for bitdoze.com — verified before publish.

  • Filming: New tutorials for the @webdoze YouTube channel.

  • Building: AI agent tooling and full-stack TypeScript product experiments.

  • Learning: Whatever ships the next product faster.