Article archive
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Local AI Pipelines: Running Real Work Through Models on Your Machine
Most conversations about local AI models stay stuck on the same demo: install Ollama, run a chatbot, ask it to write a poem. That's a tech demo, not a tool.…
Compound Automation: Why the Second Script Is Worth 10x the First
A solo builder writes a script to pull weekly revenue numbers from Stripe and format them into a spreadsheet. It saves 20 minutes a week. Useful, obviously.…
Pricing When You're One Person: Charge More, Serve Fewer
Most solo builders get pricing backwards. They look at what competitors charge, knock off 20%, and try to make up the difference in volume. This feels safe. It…
Buy vs Build: The Solo Builder's Most Expensive Mistake
I spent six weeks building a billing system. Custom invoicing, usage tracking, payment processing, dunning emails. It was clean, well-tested, and exactly what…
Monitoring Your Solo Infrastructure Without a DevOps Team
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…
Self-Hosting Email: Why I Did It (And Why You Probably Shouldn't)
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…
DNS for Solo Builders: What You Actually Need to Know
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…
Backups Nobody Runs: A Solo Builder's Data Survival Guide
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…
LaunchAgents: The macOS Cron Nobody Uses (And Why You Should)
Every macOS machine ships with a task scheduler more capable than cron. It restarts failed jobs, fires missed schedules after sleep, handles stdout logging…
Cursor vs Claude Code: Two Philosophies of AI-Assisted Development
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…
uv: Python's Package Manager Finally Doesn't Suck
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…
tmux: The Terminal Multiplexer That Runs Your Business While You Sleep
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…
PostgreSQL Is the Only Database You Need
Most solo builder stacks have four or five databases pretending to be necessary. PostgreSQL for relational data, Redis for caching and queues, Elasticsearch…
Tailscale: The VPN That Made Me Stop Port Forwarding
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…
OrbStack: Docker on Mac Without the Docker Desktop Tax
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…