dispatch
The version of building in public that gets posted to Twitter is a highlight reel. Shipped a feature, gained a user, hit a revenue milestone. Clean screenshots, tasteful blur on the revenue dashboard, a thread that ends with "keep going." It's polished, it performs well, and
strategy
Every tool you add to your stack is a commitment. Not a one-time cost, but a recurring one: updates, configuration drift, mental overhead, another login, another tab, another monthly charge. Over the past year of building solo, I've added dozens of tools. But the more interesting list is
infrastructure
Cloudflare sits in front of your site, the browser shows a padlock, and you assume your traffic is encrypted. For a lot of solo builders running self-hosted infrastructure, that assumption is wrong. The padlock means your visitor's connection to Cloudflare is encrypted. It says nothing about what happens
strategy
Venture capital has a specific thesis: fund a hundred companies, expect ninety to fail, and make all the money back on the ten that hit. This is a perfectly rational strategy if you're the one writing checks. It is an absolutely terrible strategy if you're the
ai
Running every task through a frontier model is like hiring a senior architect to update a spreadsheet. The work gets done, but the economics are absurd, and you're burning your most valuable resource on tasks that don't need it. Different AI tasks have wildly different complexity
strategy
A client has never told me "I wish you had more people." What they've told me, in various phrasings over several years, is "I wish I knew what was happening without having to ask." That distinction matters more than most solo builders realize. Clients
infrastructure
Every solo project I run has the same problem at some point: the deploy process is whatever I remember it being. SSH in, pull the latest code, restart the service, hope nothing broke. It works until it doesn't, and it doesn't at the worst possible time.
infrastructure
Google Analytics gives you 400 reports, 90% of which you will never open. Umami gives you one dashboard with everything that matters: pageviews, referrers, devices, and countries. One Docker container, one Postgres database, zero tracking cookies. If you're running a blog or a product site and the extent
ai
Solo developers don't skip code review because they think it's unnecessary. They skip it because there's nobody to do it. You wrote the code, you tested the code, you deployed the code. At no point did a second set of eyes touch anything. The
strategy
Every solo builder hits the same wall. Not a revenue wall or a skill wall. A time wall. There are 168 hours in a week, and after you subtract sleep, eating, exercise, and whatever passes for a personal life, you're left with maybe 50-60 productive hours. When the
tool-review
WordPress powers 43% of the web. That number gets cited in every CMS comparison as if popularity were a recommendation. It's not. Popularity is inertia. And for a solo builder choosing a publishing platform in 2026, inertia is the enemy of a clean stack. Ghost handles blogging, newsletters,
infrastructure
One file defines your entire stack. One command starts it. One command updates it. That is the whole deployment strategy, and for a solo builder running 1-5 projects, it is the only one you need. Docker Compose takes a YAML file that describes your services, volumes, networks, and environment variables,