Lars Barkman
writings/ventures/resume/

Independent consultant · Solopreneur

Hi, I'm Lars Barkman.

I help enterprises design, develop, and operate digital solutions they can rely on — and I build the models and tooling behind it.

The writings are where I think in the open — catching myself in the act of thinking, testing a position, or arriving at an understanding I only thought I had.

The ventures span two areas, each approached as knowledge, tooling, and services — consulting the most direct of them, and the rest where I stop describing problems and start building.

The resume is the 20+ years that led here — the same instinct running through all of it: to understand how things really work, and to make them work better.

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Writings

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Notes on organizations, technology, and the full lifecycle of digital solutions — from tactical detail to strategic perspective.

  • Aug 19, 2026solution-design
    Own, Control, Rent: A Better Way to Think About Technology Sovereignty
    A principle from I Took Self-Hosting Too Far turns out to generalize well beyond infrastructure: own what needs to be durable, control what needs to be portable, rent what is genuinely replaceable. The useful question is not build versus buy or self-hosted versus SaaS, but what relationship a capability actually needs — and since each of the three relationships carries an ongoing cost that only changes shape rather than disappearing, the goal is deliberate sovereignty rather than maximum sovereignty. None of these classifications are permanent either.
  • Aug 15, 2026solopreneurship
    I Took Self-Hosting Too Far
    A follow-up to Self-Hosting My Repositories and Sites: the repositories and pipelines stay self-hosted, but serving the static output myself added a server to maintain without a matching sovereignty benefit. Wrangler narrows the Cloudflare dependency to a deployment target instead of a development platform.
  • Aug 14, 2026solution-design
    Revisiting My Documentation Platform Decision: Keeping Astro, Leaving Starlight
    After building documentation for the Digital Solution Lifecycle Model on Astro Starlight, I realized I wanted to own the presentation layer rather than configure around a theme. Revisiting that decision: keeping Astro as the framework, replacing Starlight with custom CSS, custom Astro components, and selected shadcn primitives where they are the right tool.

Ventures

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Everything I am involved in, in one view — two areas spanning the digital solution life cycle and enterprise operating, each worked as knowledge, tooling, and services.

  • Solution Architect (Interim)
    Stepping in as solution architect — designing the architecture, leading the technical decisions, and staying hands-on through delivery.
  • Enterprise Architect (Interim)
    Stepping in as enterprise architect — clarifying ownership, shaping the operating model, and making the structural decisions that unblock delivery.
© 2026 • Lars Barkman