My role & impact

• Rescued a regularly crashing Laravel diagnostic app serving 10,000+ patient survey responses: root-caused MySQL dying from memory exhaustion on an undersized server and stabilized it for good.
• Overhauled security: rotated dangerously weak database credentials, fixed world-writable permissions, enabled a firewall, and purged leftover cloud keys, embedded git credentials, and personal-email routing from a previous vendor.
• Deployed fail2ban with a custom jail that bans credential-scanning bots on their first probe for secrets like /.env — validated against 870+ scanner hits in a single day’s logs, then used to block entire botnet subnets.
• Layered contact-form anti-spam — honeypot, timing check, Cloudflare Turnstile, and rate limiting — ending a spam flood without adding friction for real visitors.
• Fixed a misconfigured backup cron that had been running 60 times a night, replacing ~1GB of stale dumps with a daily job, 30-day retention, and off-server copies.