Field Notes
Notes from the Workshop
What I learn shipping production EdTech, retirement-advisory SaaS, and AI tooling as a solo founder. Patterns that worked, mistakes that cost, and the trade-offs nobody talks about in the docs.
Subscribe via Atom feed.
5 min readMigrating a Next.js portfolio off Vercel to Coolify
Cutover steps from Vercel to a homelab Coolify, what broke, and why operational coherence beat the symbolic cost savings.
vercelcoolifycloudflare-tunnelnextjssolo-founder
6 min readWhat I changed in next.config.mjs when leaving Vercel
Three diffs that earn their place: output standalone, edge runtime switch, explicit compression. Plus the security headers you stop getting for free.
nextjsverceldockercoolifysolo-founder
4 min readGitHub Deploy Keys Are Unique by Public Key, Not by Repo
I tried to reuse an SSH deploy key across two repos. GitHub returned a 422. The key is globally unique per user account, not per repo.
githubdevopssolo-foundergotcha
6 min readWhy I write this blog in MDX instead of using a CMS
Zero monthly cost, same git workflow as code, type-checked frontmatter, and no preview environment juggling. Trade-offs are real but acceptable for a solo site.
mdxblogtoolingsolo-founder
6 min readOne Cloudflare Tunnel for a Fleet of Small Next.js Apps
I route 10+ hostnames through a single cloudflared daemon on a Coolify host. Here is the config shape and why it works better than one tunnel per app.
cloudflare-tunnelcoolifytraefiksolo-founder
5 min readSelf-hosting Umami in two hours, dropping GA4 across the fleet
I replaced GA4 with a self-hosted Umami instance across six production sites. Setup took two hours, data stays on my Postgres, and I no longer need cookie banners.
umamianalyticsself-hostedsolo-founder
2 min readWhy this blog exists, and who it is actually for
Field notes from a solo founder shipping six production sites in three sectors. What I write here, what I do not, and why it might be useful to a few of you.
metawritingindie