Josh Ghent

Head of software engineering. I lead teams building high-traffic systems. Away from that I write small open source tools and self-host most of what I use. This is where I write about the work.

Work history & CV All writing /now

Recent writing

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Oct 28, 2026 4 min read

Last week was terrible. It didn't have to be

PHP2Shell scored a CVSS 9.2 and sent governments and ops teams into a panic. A week later, nobody has shown it working end to end, and the AI story behind it doesn't hold up.

Oct 28, 2026 2 min read

Enterprise sales teams, please, I beg you, stop

I asked for a price on a few extra seats of software we already pay for. Two days and a pile of irrelevant questions later, I got one.

Oct 16, 2026 2 min read

/groundwork: a skill that makes any repo runnable from a fresh clone

Most repos only run on the machines of the few developers who set them up. /groundwork is an agent skill that finds the missing env files, databases and docs, then fixes them.

Oct 6, 2026 3 min read

Ring is deliberately nefarious when you E2E encrypt your video

I turned on Ring's End-to-End Encryption for a bit more privacy. Previews vanished, recordings broke and answering the door stopped working. Here's what happened.

Oct 5, 2026 4 min read

I created my own status page

Status pages are a single HTML page that somehow costs thousands. So I built an open source, config-as-code one on Cloudflare, almost entirely with agents.