solopreneurship

A file-first architecture for market analysis: Parquet as the authoritative data layer, DuckDB for SQL queries, and versioned JSON and YAML for application state — plus the consistency boundaries that determine when a catalog like DuckLake becomes worthwhile.

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.

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.

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.

The TLD and availability decision for dehsomodel — the DEHSO Model's domain name, decided from the outset on the same logic as the DSLC Model's.

The follow-up to choosing a host: what it actually takes to run Forgejo per area, wire it to Cloudflare through Wrangler, and serve self-hosted sites behind a CDN using the RAD Stack's ingress layer.

Where should the public parts of my work live — on Codeberg, on GitHub, or on my own infrastructure? Codeberg's new terms exclude projects built with heavy LLM use, which is the honest description of how I work. Taking that objection seriously points at self-hosted Forgejo, and at paying for the load I generate.

A structured look at how releases get numbered — SemVer, CalVer, ZeroVer, rolling integers, marketing names, and commit hashes — what each one actually promises its reader, and why my pre-1.0 ventures are moving to date-based releases with SemVer held back for 1.0.

Two weeks after choosing dslmodel.eu I reversed it — what a dependency on a squatter, a revocable TLD, and an overweighted penalty taught me about deciding under constraints.

A structured, audience-first domain decision for a self-hosted retail trading platform — from ideal customer and TLD assessment through name candidates and availability to the final pick.

How availability reshaped a structured domain name decision — from ideal customer profile and TLD assessment through name candidates to a final choice of dslmodel.eu.

A structured evaluation of domain registrars for a solopreneur with a modest portfolio of domains. Covers Namecheap, Porkbun, Cloudflare Registrar, INWX, Hetzner, Infomaniak, and EuroDNS against requirements including stable ownership, transparent pricing, WHOIS privacy, EU sovereignty, and separation from the primary hosting provider. New domains are going to INWX; existing ones stay with Namecheap for now.

A structured evaluation of ten documentation platforms — Docusaurus, VitePress, Starlight, Doks, Material for MkDocs, Antora, and more — against requirements for versioned, long-running documentation projects. Covers performance, versioning, search, and ecosystem viability, with scoring tables, a progressive elimination process, and an incremental implementation plan built around Starlight. Starting from the needs of the Digital Solution Lifecycle Model and its companion tooling, but intended as a reusable approach for future projects.

Most open source projects inherit a contribution policy they never chose. For a solopreneur with a commercial model, that default is wrong — ownership, AI noise, and commercial leverage all push toward closed. Here is when and how to open the door: with payment, with a CLA, or not at all.

The previous post laid out why licensing matters for a solopreneur working in the open. This one is the decision: AGPL v3 for the code, CC Attribution-ShareAlike for the writing — and the reasoning behind each choice.

Can you give everything away and still build something financially sustainable? This post works through the distinction between open source code and Creative Commons writing, maps the available monetization models, and reasons through why open core falls short, and why consultancy alone is not enough — and what a workable alternative might look like.

I write to process my thoughts, formulate my stances, and build my understanding of things. The material that comes out of that process might be useful to others — and gives clients a window into how I think before we've even spoken.