HectorZelaya.dev

Personal Cloud Storage with WebDAV, S3, and NixOS on EC2

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As a lifelong gamer, I play across several devices — handheld, phone, desktop. RetroArch can sync saves between them, but it requires a WebDAV server.

That constraint gave me an excuse to build something I’d been wanting anyway: a single storage endpoint I fully control, backed by S3, managed declaratively with NixOS. Once the WebDAV server existed for game saves, expanding it to handle music production stems, database backups, and photos was just a matter of adding path prefixes.

NixOS: The Good, The Bad, and The Awesome

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve used Linux for any meaningful amount of time, you’ve probably distro-hopped at least once. Maybe twice. Maybe you lost count. Each distribution promises a slightly better experience — faster updates, more stability, better hardware support — but under the hood, most of them share the same fundamental approach: install packages imperatively, mutate the filesystem in place, and hope things don’t break on the next upgrade.

I’ve been running NixOS as my daily driver for a while now, and I can confidently say it’s unlike anything else in the Linux world. It solves real problems that no other distro even attempts to address, but it also introduces new friction that can be genuinely frustrating. This post is my honest take on the experience — what’s good, what’s bad, and why I still think it’s awesome.

Demystifying AWS Networking: From Cloud Basics to Building Your First VPC

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:49:00 -0600

Networking is the foundation of everything you build in the cloud. Before you can run a web server, store a file, or host a database, you need a place for it to live and a way for it to communicate.

In this post, we are going to break down the physical reality of the cloud, explain the core concepts of AWS networking in plain English, and finally, build a working network from scratch using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

Nova: A NVIDIA Driver Written in Rust for the Linux Kernel - Part 1

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 13:56:42 -0600

Part 1: Architecture, Initialization & Hardware Discovery Link to heading

This is Part 1 of a three-part series exploring Nova, a new open-source GPU driver written in Rust for NVIDIA GPUs in the Linux kernel. This post covers the two-driver architecture, PCI initialization, BAR0 mapping, GPU identification, and safe register access.

Note: Nova is under active development. The code shown here reflects the upstream state as of writing, but APIs are evolving — some features described are work-in-progress. For the current state, check the nova-gpu mailing list and the NVIDIA/nova development branch.

Writing My First Linux Kernel Patch: From User Space to Kernel with Kiro IDE

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:26:42 -0600

I’ve used Linux daily for over a decade—drawn in by its customization, its reliability, and the open philosophy around the kernel and OS utilities that makes the whole thing tick. But after all these years, and despite my software engineering background, I never got involved with its development, and most of my dev experience was around user space: web applications, cloud infrastructure, containers, configuration management. The kernel and open source utilities were this mythical layer I depended on but never touched.

Spec'ing my way to Mixing and Mastering a Song in Reaper with reaper-mcp and Kiro IDE

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:26:42 -0600

Producing music and writing code have surprisingly a lot in common. Both require a delicate balance of rigid structure and free-flowing creativity. Just like a developer has to wrestle with boilerplate code, environment setups, and syntax errors before they can build a killer feature, an audio engineer spends hours on tedious tasks—tweaking volume knobs, notch-filtering harsh frequencies, and meticulously gain-staging—before they can actually focus on the vibe of a track.

If Your Business Relies on Open Source, You Want to Contribute Back

Sun, 31 May 2026 20:16:42 -0600

Like The Force in Star Wars, open-source software surrounds us, penetrates our servers, and binds the digital universe together. It is the invisible engine powering modern business.

Whether you realize it or not, your company is likely standing on the shoulders of open-source giants. We rely on the Linux kernel to run our cloud infrastructure, web servers like Nginx or Apache to host our sites, and technologies tools like WebRTC to exchange media in real-time.

C in the Times of AI

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

C in the Times of AI Link to heading

The AI coding revolution Link to heading

AI coding agents are everywhere. In just a couple of years they went from novelty to necessity in many software teams. Tools like Copilot, Cursor, Kiro, and a growing list of alternatives promise to write code faster than any human could. And they deliver — sort of.

Git 101: The Basics

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Git 101: Initialize a repo and create versions. Link to heading

What is Git? Link to heading

Has this ever happened to you?

It undeniable that files are part of our daily “computer life”, but some times they are a bit complex to work with. This applies to either documentation, source code or that report that our teachers or bosses require (often urgently).

What Is Devops

Sun, 10 Mar 2019 16:39:27 -0600

What is DevOps? Link to heading

The term “DevOps” comes from the fusion of the words “Development” and “Operations”. Essentially the main objective of the DevOps philosophy is to reduce the silos between the Development and Operations departments in order to improve the delivery of software products.

DevOps aims to motivate collaboration between two areas that traditionally have been looked as two different entities with different objectives. But this not only applies to just these two, QA and InfoSec play an important role and hence suit perfectly into the application field.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About Me Link to heading

I’m Hector Zelaya, a Computer Systems Engineer from El Salvador — a small and beautiful country in Central America.

What I Do Link to heading

I’m a WebRTC Developer Advocate at WebRTC.ventures, where I work on real-time communication applications, technical content, and community building. I help teams understand and adopt WebRTC, AI and DevOps.

I’m also an AWS Community Builder and a 2x AWS Certified professional. I speak at events like AWS Community Day México and write about cloud infrastructure, AI agents, and developer tooling.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Music Link to heading

I produce music as a creative outlet alongside my engineering work. Here are my recent releases.

Reina I (2026) Link to heading

Listen on your favorite platform:

Reina II (2026) Link to heading

Listen on your favorite platform: