How I Built One Dashboard for All My Self-Hosted Services
How I built fzlaunchpad: a fast, YAML-configured dashboard that puts my self-hosted services and their current status on one page.
Author
Mohammad Afzal
Mohammad Afzal is a Senior Staff Engineer with more than a decade of experience building and modernizing cloud-native systems across banking, insurance, SaaS, and product platforms. He works across Java, Spring Boot, AWS, Kubernetes, DevOps, and applied AI, and writes about engineering decisions, automation, and lessons from running systems in practice.
7 articles by Mohammad
How I Added Self-Hosted Comments to My Static Blog
How I added Google-authenticated comments to an Astro blog with Remark42, Docker, a dedicated comments subdomain, and Traefik.
Running split DNS at home with dnsmasq
How to resolve the same hostname locally at home and through a public route outside, using dnsmasq on a Raspberry Pi.
A professional email address on my own domain—for free
How I connected Cloudflare Email Routing, SMTP2GO, and Gmail so I could receive and send mail as contact@afzalex.com without paying for a hosted mailbox.
How I Made My Static Website Form Send Real Email
How I connected a static website form to a verified inbox using a small Cloudflare Worker, Turnstile verification, and an Email Service binding.
Cloudflare Turnstile: A Smarter, Free Alternative to CAPTCHA
How Turnstile protects web actions from automated abuse with less friction, and why its server-side verification matters as much as the visible widget.
Pulling the backup home
What I learned while replacing a server-driven push with an automatic Ubuntu-to-Mac pull, and the small details that made it reliable.
