Insights on solo development, AI tools, and building digital products as an independent developer.
A three-part pattern for scheduling future-dated posts on a static site, keeping them out of the index and sitemap, and avoiding the orphan trap.
A tiny self-hosted Discord bot is a cheap always-on ops surface for a solo dev. Scope its cluster access read-only and render status as cards, not log walls.
Comparing PostHog and Plausible for solo developers. Full product analytics versus privacy-first page tracking. Features, pricing, and which to install.
How I matched the AI tool to the job to translate a blog into eleven languages at full parity, with a parity audit so scale could not silently break.
World 11 is a football game with no passing, shooting, or defending. You draft a team and watch the result. Here is why a game about betting instead of playing is so addictive, and how the draft loop works.
AI image generation is slow and async. Webhooks fail, so I run a reconciliation system that makes the backend converge to the right state on its own.
Comparing Polar and Stripe for solo developers. Merchant-of-record billing for digital products versus the payments default. Fees, taxes, and which to pick.
I built a small content registry that scans every blog and verifies each post is actually reachable and in the sitemap, not just marked published in a row somewhere.
My scheduled jobs silently failed for two weeks because a token went empty. The fix was to run them as native k3s CronJobs on the node where the runner already lived.
My draft roguelike was too easy. A strong team won the cup two-thirds of the time, so winning meant nothing. Here is how I stopped guessing and tuned it to a real one-in-three with a few hundred simulated runs.
Comparing Kinde and Clerk for solo developers. Two hosted auth providers with different pricing models and feature sets. Which to use and when.
A recipe-driven Playwright engine that submits one product to many directory sites by modeling the form pattern, not the site, with explicit success detection.
How I turned a script into a finished video with code instead of a timeline app, and why determinism is the real win for a solo dev.
Comparing Better Auth and Lucia for solo developers. Batteries-included TypeScript auth versus a minimal session library. Which to pick in 2026 and why.
I wanted real footballer photos on the cards in my draft game, free-licensed only. The fetch was easy. Not shipping the philosopher Socrates instead of the footballer was the hard part. Here is the pipeline and the disambiguation fix.