The struggles of rebuilding a business in the new AI age... with open source
Kickoff pillar post about using open-source technologies and rebuilding my company
This post is a kickoff for a series of blog posts documenting how I’m rebuilding my company’s entire technology stack from the ground up using open-source and self-hosted tools; no vendor lock-in, no endless SaaS subscriptions. Trying to share some things that I have learned behind the scenes.
If you’re a solo-preneur or small business owner who is tired of renting your business’s infrastructure one subscription at a time, this series is for you.
So why should you care about some random person on the Internet documenting this out?
Simply, I have grown a career utilizing open-source technologies to solve problems businesses face, and to help product teams remove barriers so they can get their products in front of customers faster. What I have noticed throughout my career is that documentation and a lending hand in the open-source product world require a certain set of skills that are different from what companies get when they just utilize a set of enterprise tools.
With enterprise tools at your disposal, you are pretty much paying for support from the vendor to guide you through onboarding and troubleshooting. Additionally, some enterprise tools require you to use their cloud infrastructure locking you in. Open-source and self-hosted tools require you to have some technical understanding to fill in the gaps the documentation often overlooks. These gaps are sometimes intentional as businesses need a way to generate money to run their internal operations and expenses, and free software can only carry you so far.
That gap between documents and operationalizing open source technologies is exactly where I’ve spent my career. This series is me documenting that gap, out in the open, one problem at a time.
So what makes this different?
I believe in battle-testing various open-source products to see how they really pan out in the real world. Not to throw shade on anyone, but you can scroll through countless videos and blogs online for product reviews and comparisons. But let’s face it, after the initial setup, things running smoothly for a couple of days isn’t a real comprehensive review. I like to see how things are months or years down the road, when the business has now operationalized the said technology and is now dependent on it. It’s widely known that it is a pain to rip up an existing solution to put in a new one (ask any business that had to redo their ERP strategy).
So I chose to document my build with this series: every solution you see here is one I actually run my own company on. If it falls over six months from now, you’ll read about that too. Just for those that are interested, previous I used to document some of my work over at Medium, however I stopped and decided to use my own website. Additionally, I happened to be employed full time while being a freelancer so I restricted what I posted on Social Media to avoid content ownership issues.
So what is this series about?
I’m starting at the network connectivity layer. It may be odd to start here without looking at the services business require first but this is often helps to set the limits with what services should be on the network and what services should just be running on the laptop/computers. Given most businesses now require more remote working access I felt this should be tackled first.
- Tale of 2 cities… actually just 2 offices — how to connect an HQ office to a branch office on the other side of the world as a solo-preneur, using a WireGuard hub-and-spoke overlay network and nothing more than a cheap VPS.
- VPN setup as a RoadWarrior — extending that same network so remote users (and their laptops and phones) can securely reach internal services from anywhere.
From there, each post tackles another real problem that a small business eventually faces and solves it with an open-source alternative to the subscription we’re all just supposed to accept.
Where to go from here
I just started this process of documentation and trying to promote alternatives for others to consider. In the meantime, you can keep following this site and subscribe to my newsletter where I will email out updates.