Piperace Blog
Notes on tunneling, local development, and building tools that just work.
I wanted three things on localhost
My day job is payment integrations, where the bug is always in a request I did not make, sent by a server I do not own. Three separate tools used to stand between me and those bytes, so I put them in one binary — and then kept adding things I am not sure anyone else needs.
Thinking out loudWhat happens when I close the lid
An idea I keep circling and have not built: your own machine as the real host, and somewhere to fall to when it goes away. Working through why the code half is easy, the data half has one workable shape, and split brain is a product decision in an engineering costume.
TroubleshootingFix: "port 443 is taken by …" on macOS, Linux and Windows
Why something else is already listening on 443, and how to free it up (or just live with a port in the address) on each OS.
ComparisonPiperace vs ngrok vs Cloudflare Tunnel vs localhost.run
Four ways to give something on your machine a public address, and where each one stops: stable addresses, trusted local HTTPS, seeing the requests, a password on the link, and what it costs.