Founder of Wapka & Zuna. I write about AI, programming, hosting, and the philosophy of building things on the internet.
The simplest blog is just text files
Moved my blog from WordPress to Hugo on GitHub Pages. No more PHP. No MySQL. No /wp-admin. No plugin updates. No server to maintain. Just markdown files in a Git repo. Push to deploy. Everything is pre-built HTML — there’s nothing to hack, nothing to crash, nothing to patch. Why it matters A blog should be simple. WordPress was overkill for 25 posts. Hugo builds the entire site in under 200ms. GitHub Pages serves it for free. SSL auto-renewed. No hosting panel, no control panel, no cron jobs, no email alerts about outdated plugins at 2am. ...
Google’s NotebookLM: A Game-Changer for Education and a Prime Example of AI’s Potential
Google’s NotebookLM: A Game-Changer for Education and a Prime Example of AI’s Potential In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, Google has once again pushed the boundaries of innovation with NotebookLM, a powerful AI-powered research and note-taking assistant. This isn’t just another chatbot; it’s a sophisticated tool designed to revolutionize how we interact with information, making it an invaluable asset for students, educators, and researchers alike. Let’s delve into what makes NotebookLM a standout example of modern AI and how it’s poised to transform the world of education. ...
100GB free storage + server-side scripting for $0 — here is how
100 gigabytes of storage. Free SSL certificates. Global CDN. Server-side scripting. Three websites. Zero dollars. People sometimes ask if this is a loss leader — a marketing tactic to acquire users and upsell them later. It is not. The free tier exists because the platform’s architecture makes it economically viable. The math A standard VPS costs roughly $5 per month. It gives you 25GB of storage and enough CPU to serve a few hundred concurrent users. To offer 100GB of storage to a single user, you would need a $20+ server — and that is before factoring in bandwidth costs. ...
A decade of code, zero forced migrations
Most platforms upgrade by breaking things. Old versions are deprecated. APIs are removed. Users are told to migrate — or lose access. It happens everywhere. WordPress plugins break on updates. Python 2 code stopped working when Python 3 shipped. iOS apps need constant rewrites to stay in the App Store. Wapka took a different path. Code written in 2013 still runs today. Unchanged. Alongside code written this year. How is that possible — and why does it matter? ...
Between Wix and Vercel there is a void — here is what fills it
The web platform market has two extremes. On one side: Wix, Squarespace, Webflow. Beautiful visual builders. Zero backend. You can create a stunning page, but the moment you need a login system, a database query, or a custom API endpoint — you have hit the ceiling. On the other side: Vercel, Netlify, AWS. Unlimited backend power. But you need to know JavaScript frameworks, configure CI/CD pipelines, set up external databases, and stitch together third-party services just to get a simple site online. ...
Building for the long tail, not the enterprise
Every platform says they serve everyone. They rarely mean it. Wapka means it — but not the way most people assume. We do not target enterprises. We do not have a sales team. We do not offer SOC2 compliance reports or dedicated account managers. We are not trying to replace AWS. We target the long tail: individuals, creators, students, small teams, independent developers. The people who are underserved by every other platform. ...
Built by people around the world: the Wapka community story
When people see Wapka, they see a platform. What they do not see — what is invisible from the outside — is the thousands of people who built it. I wrote the initial code. But the platform you see today was shaped by every user who reported a bug, suggested a feature, wrote a module, created a theme, helped another user learn, or contributed to the open-source repository. This post is about them. ...
From Wapka user to Wapka developer: the career path
Most platforms train you in their way of doing things. When you outgrow them, you leave. Your skills are platform-specific. Your content needs to be rebuilt elsewhere. Wapka was designed differently. The platform grows with you. Level 1: Visual builder You drag and drop. You create pages. You add modules. Within hours, you have a live website. At this stage, you are learning the fundamentals: how pages are structured, how navigation works, how content is organized. You do not need to know how to code. ...
From zero coding knowledge to shipping a platform
When I committed to building Wapka, I had a clear destination. I didn’t yet know the path. I understood HTML and CSS. But servers, databases, deployment, SSL, DNS — these were all unknowns. So I did what made sense: I started learning. Year one: building the foundation The first year was discovery. PHP. Databases. How a web server handles requests. Shared hosting versus VPS. Each concept unlocked the next. I built prototypes. Early ones were limited — simple subdomain routing, basic file uploads, a minimal database layer. Each prototype taught me something. Each limitation pointed to what needed to improve next. ...
How I acquired what seemed impossible
I did not know what a domain was when I first needed one. I opened a dictionary and found: “a kingdom.” I wanted a kingdom of my own on the internet. I had $10 and no way to send money across borders. This is the story of how I kept acquiring anyway — one rejection, one negotiation, one domain at a time. The .com I could not have The original Wapka ran on wapka.com. When it ended, the domain stayed with the previous owner. I was young, early in the rebuild, and had almost nothing. ...