Article archive
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Saying No to Features: How to Ship When Nobody Is Stopping You
The most dangerous moment in a solo build isn't the technical challenge. It's Tuesday night, the core feature works, and you think: one more thing. On a team,…
The Tools I Stopped Using (And Why)
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,…
Client Communication as a Solo: How to Seem Like a Team
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…
When to Hire Your First Contractor (And What to Never Outsource)
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,…
Revenue Architecture for One: Recurring, Project, and Hybrid Models
A solo builder who bills $150/hour and works 30 billable hours a week makes $234K a year. On paper, that's a strong number. In practice, it means that every…
The Anti-VC Path: Building a Business That Doesn't Need Permission
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…
Umami: Self-Hosted Analytics That Respects Your Readers
Google Analytics gives you 400 reports, 90% of which you will never open. Umami gives you one dashboard with everything that matters: pageviews, referrers,…
Docker Compose for Everything: The Solo Builder's Deployment Pattern
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…
SSL/TLS in 2026: What Solo Builders Get Wrong
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…
The $0 CI/CD Pipeline: GitHub Actions for Solo Projects
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…
Ghost vs WordPress vs Static Sites: The Solo Builder's CMS Decision
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…
Raycast: The Launcher That Replaced 5 Apps on My Mac
I used to run Spotlight for search, Rectangle for window management, Flycut for clipboard history, TextExpander for snippets, and a handful of Automator…
ffmpeg: The Swiss Army Knife You're Underusing
ffmpeg does the work of five SaaS subscriptions from a single command line. Video compression, audio extraction, thumbnail generation, format conversion, batch…
Caddy: The Web Server That Handles Its Own SSL
Nginx makes you configure SSL yourself. Caddy does it automatically, for every domain, with zero lines of certificate configuration. That difference sounds…
Prompt Engineering for Real Work (Not Chatbot Tricks)
Most prompt engineering advice is written for people asking chatbots questions. "Act as an expert." "Think step by step." "Be thorough and careful." These…