Following my decision to migrate away from Contabo, I began planning my next infrastructure iteration. Before committing to Ampere-based hardware for cost savings, I needed to validate that my existing workloads would run on arm64 without issues. So, I provisioned a 12-node Kubernetes cluster using exclusively arm64 instances from Netcup—three control plane nodes and nine workers.

I've been using Dendron since late 2021 - a note-taking tool built for developers that clicked with how I wanted to organize personal knowledge.

Development slowed in late 2022, and by early 2023, the founder officially announced they were stepping away. For over two years, the project sat abandoned. In 2025, I finally decided to fork it, because I wanted specific features and nobody else had picked it up yet. What I found when I dove into the codebase explained a lot about why development had stalled: layers of architectural decisions had created a maintenance nightmare.

This is what it took to make it workable again.