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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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 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
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