strategy
I spent six weeks building a billing system. Custom invoicing, usage tracking, payment processing, dunning emails. It was clean, well-tested, and exactly what I needed. It was also the single worst allocation of time in my entire solo practice. Stripe Billing does all of it. $0 upfront. 0.7% per
infrastructure
Every production system fails eventually. The question is whether you find out from your monitoring or from a customer. If you're running a solo builder stack — a Mac Mini in a closet, a couple of Cloudflare Tunnels, a PostgreSQL database, maybe a handful of cron jobs that keep
infrastructure
I run my own mail server. Postfix on a VPS, DKIM keys I generated, SPF records I wrote, DMARC policies I set. It delivers transactional emails for my applications and handles the occasional notification pipeline. It works. It took about three full days to get to "works." It
infrastructure
Most developers interact with DNS the way most drivers interact with their engine: they know it exists, they know it matters, and when something goes wrong they open the hood and stare at it hoping the problem will announce itself. It rarely does. DNS is the infrastructure layer most solo
infrastructure
Every solo builder I know has a database running somewhere. A Mac Mini under a desk, a $5 VPS, a Raspberry Pi in a closet. They've spent weeks building the application on top of it. They've spent zero time thinking about what happens when the disk
tool-review
Every macOS machine ships with a task scheduler more capable than cron. It restarts failed jobs, fires missed schedules after sleep, handles stdout logging natively, and doesn't require memorizing five-field time syntax. It's called launchd, and almost nobody outside Apple's own engineering teams uses
tool-review
Cursor wraps AI around your editor. Claude Code wraps your editor around AI. That distinction sounds like semantics until you use both for a month and realize they produce different kinds of work. I've been running both since late 2025. Cursor for frontend projects where I'm
tool-review
pip is slow. virtualenv is clunky. pyenv is fragile. pipx is fine until it isn't. uv replaces all four with a single Rust binary that installs packages in milliseconds instead of seconds. That's not marketing copy. I timed it. What uv Replaces Before uv, a Python
tool-review
Most people describe tmux as a way to split your terminal into panes. That undersells it by about 90%. tmux is a session manager, a process supervisor, and a deployment tool disguised as a terminal multiplexer. If you run anything in a terminal that needs to survive closing your laptop
tool-review
Most solo builder stacks have four or five databases pretending to be necessary. PostgreSQL for relational data, Redis for caching and queues, Elasticsearch for search, Pinecone for embeddings, maybe RabbitMQ for pub/sub. That's five processes to monitor, five sets of credentials, five things that can fail at
tool-review
I used to forward ports. I used to edit SSH configs. I used to keep a text file of IP addresses for every machine I owned because I couldn't remember which was 192.168.1.47 and which was 192.168.1.52. Tailscale replaced all of that
docker
Docker Desktop wants $11/month for a business license. OrbStack does the same thing, faster, with less RAM, and it’s free for personal use. If you’re running containers on a Mac and haven’t switched yet, you’re leaving performance on the table. What OrbStack Gets Right OrbStack