Kubernetes can solve real problems. But for small teams, its complexity often costs more than it returns. In our case, the real cost wasn’t infra. It was lost product capacity.
Devcontainers work best when they stay small. Here is the approach that has held up over another year of using them daily.
Most stacks are designed for scale. Mine is designed to stay simple. This is what I actually use, and why.
As a solo builder, your bottleneck is not scale. It is complexity. Lightweight architecture is not about building less. It is about building something you can actually operate alone. Simplicity scales further than you think.
I wanted blog subscriptions, not a new SaaS project. So I used OneSignal for email + push and wired notifications into CI using frontmatter dates. No backend. No user table. No admin UI. The best system is the one you stop thinking about.
When convenience tools become inconvenient.
Enforcing a consistent style for initializing optional variables in SwiftLint.
Smokes used to use a Swift backend hosted on AWS. Here’s why we replaced it with Vercel.
Isolated, reproducible, and clean environments for modern development.
Saving money, gaining analytics, and smoothing out the rough edges.