Development on Sergio Comerón Blog

Self-hosting without fear: how Cloudflare keeps my home Mac mini online

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

This website doesn’t live on any hosting provider. It lives on a Mac mini sitting at home, under my desk, serving with Apache not just sergiocomeron.com, but also the Moodle site, Jitsi, and a couple of other projects.

Self-hosting has something addictive about it: total control, no monthly hosting bills, and the joy of tinkering with your own infrastructure. But it has an Achilles’ heel that traditional hosting doesn’t: if the power goes out at home, or the internet drops, the website goes down with me. When I compared it to another site I had on a hosting service, that was where I was losing.

How I code in 2026: my stack in the age of agents

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

I’ve been turning over an uncomfortable thought for weeks: I open an editor to write code less and less. I direct it, I review it, I approve it, but I type less every day. And yet I’m publishing more than ever: two podcasts, a personal website with nine tools, server monitoring, my own Jitsi instance, an Apple fan site, more Moodle plugins than ever, this blog. Something has shifted in how I program, and I think it’s worth writing down.

Gemini 3.5 Flash: speed over intelligence for AI agents

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Google presented Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O on May 19th. Fast, cheap, optimised for agents. Good news for developers. But the most interesting thing is not what it does for Google — it’s who else is going to use it.

Apple has a multi-year agreement with Google to integrate Gemini models into Apple Intelligence. WWDC 2026 is on June 8th. All signs point to the new Siri — the one they’ve been promising for years and never quite delivering — running, at least in part, on this very model.

Cloudflare Tunnel: expose your home server without opening ports

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

I have a Mac mini M4 at home serving this website, the blog, Moodle and several tools. For a long time I assumed that exposing anything to the internet meant opening ports on the router, dealing with dynamic IPs and hoping the ISP wouldn’t block incoming traffic. Cloudflare Tunnel solved all of that at once.

What is Cloudflare Tunnel

Cloudflare Tunnel is a free service that creates an outbound encrypted connection between your server and the Cloudflare network. Instead of the internet reaching your server, it’s your server that reaches out to Cloudflare. Result: no open ports, no exposed IP, no router headaches.

Free tools for developers and educators

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Over the past few weeks I’ve been building a collection of free tools for developers and educators, hosted on my own server. No registration, no usage limits, no ads. Everything runs directly in the browser whenever possible, and when it needs a server, it runs on my Mac mini.

Here’s a summary of what’s available.

Spanish fake data generator

This one took the most effort and I think it has the most unique value.

From Recorded Class to Moodle Quiz in One Click

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Every time a teacher records a class, a learning opportunity is created that usually goes to waste. The video sits in storage, students watch it (or don’t), and the teacher moves on. No assessment, no summary, no way to navigate the content.

mod_jitsi changes that with three AI-powered features that activate directly from the Moodle activity.

Automatic Quiz

With one click, the plugin generates a complete quiz based on the actual content of the recording. The questions aren’t generic: they’re extracted from what the teacher explained in that specific session. The quiz is created directly as a Quiz activity in the same course — no copy-pasting required.

What's new in the Jitsi plugin v5.0

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

With version 5.0 of mod_jitsi the plugin takes a significant step forward in four directions: installation management through a developer portal, recording analytics with a viewing heatmap and attendance report, real-time presence in the room, and several security and performance improvements.

1. Developer Portal

Until now there was no mechanism to know how many installations of the plugin existed or which features were being used. v5.0 adds an opt-in registration and telemetry system managed from portal.sergiocomeron.com.

What's new in the Jitsi plugin v4.6

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Version 4.6 of the mod_jitsi plugin is probably the biggest update since we introduced automatic provisioning on GCP. It touches four very different but complementary areas: recordings, AI on top of the recordings, private sessions between users, and a new tutoring-hours system. Let’s go through them one by one.

1. Recordings on GCP: the Jibri pool

What is Jibri

Jibri is the official recording component of Jitsi Meet. It is a separate virtual machine that joins the room as an invisible participant, captures video and audio with Chrome and saves the result as an MP4 file.

New in mod_jitsi: Automatic Server Provisioning on Google Cloud

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

One of the biggest barriers to implementing videoconferencing in Moodle has been infrastructure. With the new version of the mod_jitsi plugin, we’ve revolutionized this by introducing automatic provisioning of Jitsi servers on Google Cloud Platform.

The Problem We Solve

Traditionally, to have your own Jitsi server you needed to:

Manually configure a Linux server
Install and configure Jitsi Meet
Set up SSL with Let’s Encrypt
Implement JWT authentication for moderator control
Manage DNS and static IP addresses
Maintain and scale the infrastructure

All of this required advanced technical knowledge and considerable time. Not anymore.