Michael Soto

I'm a senior content strategist & technical writer working for Elest.io. I turn complex self-hosted solutions into clear, actionable guides. 7 years crafting developer content. Coffee-fueled, deadline-ready, obsessed with finding the right words.

Zulip

Why Remote Teams Are Switching from Slack to Zulip (Threading Changes Everything)

If you've ever come back from a meeting to find 200 unread Slack messages across 15 channels, you know the feeling. That sinking realization that somewhere in that wall of notifications is something important, but finding it means scrolling through memes, random questions, and half-finished conversations that went

Apache Superset

Apache Superset + PostgreSQL: Build Executive Dashboards Your Team Will Actually Use

Your company has data. Probably a lot of it. And somewhere, someone is asking for "a dashboard" to make sense of it all. The problem? Tableau costs $70/user/month, and you have a perfectly good PostgreSQL database sitting there, full of insights nobody can access without writing

Self-Hosted

The 2026 Homelab Stack: What Self-Hosters Are Actually Running This Year

Spend five minutes on r/selfhosted or any homelab forum and you'll notice something interesting: the conversations have changed. Two years ago, everyone was asking "what should I run?" Now they're sharing sophisticated stacks that rival small business infrastructure. The self-hosting movement has matured.

Meilisearch

Meilisearch + Your Stack: Build Instant Search for React, Vue, or Any Frontend in Under 30 Minutes

You've probably been there. Your app's search is powered by SQL LIKE queries, and users are typing "javascrpt" expecting to find JavaScript tutorials. The result? Nothing. Zero matches. And they bounce. Meilisearch fixes this in a way that feels almost magical. It's

Appwrite

The Rise of Open-Source Backend Platforms: Firebase, Supabase, and Appwrite Compared

Something interesting happened in backend development over the past two years. Firebase, once the default choice for startups building their first app, started losing ground to open-source alternatives. Not because Firebase stopped working, but because developers realized they were trading convenience for control. The shift tells a bigger story about

Comparison

Elestio vs Railway vs Render vs Fly.io: Which Platform Actually Fits Your Needs?

If you're looking to deploy applications in 2025, you've probably stumbled across Railway, Render, and Fly.io. They're everywhere in developer discussions, and for good reason. They promise easy deployments, git-push workflows, and that sweet "it just works" experience. But here'

NocoDB

Why Your Team Should Replace Spreadsheets with NocoDB (And Save Hours Every Week)

Somewhere in your company right now, there's a spreadsheet causing problems. Maybe it's the customer list that three people edited simultaneously and now has duplicate rows. Maybe it's the project tracker that grew so complex nobody remembers which formulas depend on what. Or maybe

Uptime Kuma

Why Every Small Business Needs Uptime Monitoring (And How Uptime Kuma Makes It Affordable)

Your website goes down at 2 PM on a Tuesday. You find out three hours later when a customer emails asking why they can't place an order. By then, you've lost sales, frustrated customers, and damaged trust you spent months building. This happens to small businesses

BookStack

Why Your Team Needs a Knowledge Base (And How BookStack Makes It Simple)

Every company has the same problem: knowledge scattered across random Google Docs, outdated Notion pages, and that one Slack message from six months ago that nobody can find. When an employee leaves, they take half the company's knowledge with them. When a new hire joins, they spend weeks

Chatwoot

Chatwoot + Webhooks: Build Custom Chatbots and Integrate with Your CRM

Customer support platforms are usually closed boxes. Messages come in, agents respond, tickets get closed. But what if you need to sync conversations to your CRM? Or trigger automated responses based on customer data? Or route tickets based on custom business logic? Chatwoot solves this with webhooks and a comprehensive

Jitsi

Why Your Business Should Own Its Video Calls (And How Jitsi Makes It Affordable)

Video calls have become the backbone of modern business. Team standups, client presentations, job interviews, board meetings. If your company went remote or hybrid in the past few years, you probably spend hours each week on Zoom or Microsoft Teams. But here's something worth thinking about: every conversation

N8N

N8N + Webhooks: Build Event-Driven Automations That Replace Your Cron Jobs

Cron jobs work until they don't. You set up a script to run every five minutes, checking for new orders or syncing data between systems. Then one day it fails silently. Or it runs twice. Or the server reboots and nobody remembers to restart the cron daemon. Event-driven

Metabase

Metabase + PostgreSQL: Build Interactive Dashboards Without Writing SQL

Your database is full of answers. Sales trends, customer behavior, product performance. But getting those answers usually means writing SQL queries, waiting for engineering, or paying for expensive BI tools that require a data analyst to operate. Metabase changes that equation. It connects directly to your PostgreSQL database and lets

Vaultwarden

Why Your Business Should Self-Host Its Passwords (And How Vaultwarden Makes It Easy)

Your team uses dozens of passwords. Email, CRM, accounting software, cloud storage, social media accounts, vendor portals. Most employees handle this reality in one of two ways: they reuse the same password everywhere, or they keep a spreadsheet of credentials on their desktop. Both approaches are disasters waiting to happen.

Paperless-ngx

Go Paperless in 2026: How Paperless-ngx Organizes Your Documents Better Than Dropbox

That filing cabinet in the corner of your office? It's not just taking up space. It's costing you hours every week in lost documents, misfiled invoices, and the endless "where did I put that contract?" moments. In 2026, there's no reason to

PostHog

Why PostHog Is the Smarter Alternative to Google Analytics and Mixpanel

Your website gets traffic. People click around. Some buy, most don't. But why? Google Analytics tells you that people left. PostHog tells you why. That distinction matters more than you think. The Problem with Traditional Analytics Google Analytics is like a security camera that only records headcounts. You

Grafana

Grafana + Prometheus + Loki: Build a Complete Observability Stack

Metrics without logs are useless. Logs without metrics are noise. You need both, correlated, in one place. That's what the Grafana observability stack gives you. The combination of Prometheus (metrics), Loki (logs), and Grafana (visualization) has become the de facto standard for self-hosted observability. It's what

Prometheus

Prometheus + Alertmanager: Build Production-Ready Monitoring with Custom Alert Rules

Your servers are on fire and you find out from a customer tweet. Sound familiar? That's what happens when you rely on uptime checks instead of real monitoring. Prometheus is the monitoring system that powers most of the cloud-native world. Paired with Alertmanager, it becomes a complete alerting

Compliance

Compliance Made Simple: How Elestio Handles ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR For You

Last month, a SaaS founder asked me what it takes to become SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliant. When I told them that hosting on a compliant provider like Elestio is a key requirement, they realized they were already halfway there. Here's the thing about compliance: it'

Valkey

Valkey: Drop-In Redis Replacement with Better Performance and No Licensing Worries

Look, if you're still running Redis in production and haven't heard about Valkey yet, we need to talk. Redis changed their license in 2024, and while that sent shockwaves through the community, something better emerged from the chaos: Valkey—a fully open-source fork that's

Development

Gitea Actions: Build Your Own GitHub-Like CI/CD Pipeline Without the Price Tag

GitHub Actions changed how teams think about CI/CD. But at $4 per user per month (and that's just for the Team plan), the costs add up fast. For a 20-person team, you're looking at $960/year before you even run a single pipeline. Here'

Development

Why Your Business Needs Single Sign-On (And How Authentik Makes It Affordable)

Your employees are drowning in passwords. The average worker manages credentials for 70-80 different applications—and that number keeps growing. The result? Sticky notes with passwords, repeated credentials across services, and IT tickets for forgotten logins that never seem to stop. This isn't just an annoyance. It'

Applications

Outline: The Open-Source Notion Alternative Your Team Actually Needs

Your team's knowledge is scattered everywhere. Meeting notes in Google Docs, project specs in Notion, onboarding guides in random Slack threads, and that critical process document... somewhere in someone's email? This is the reality for most growing teams. And honestly? Notion and Confluence were supposed to

Immich

Immich API: Build Custom Photo Workflows and Automate Your Library

I didn't think I'd care about a photo management API. Then I realized my family has 50,000 photos scattered across devices, and Google's AI is training on every single one of them. Immich changed that. It's a self-hosted Google Photos alternative

Cal.com API: Build Custom Booking Flows and Integrate with Your Stack

Look, I'm going to be real with you: most scheduling tools treat their API like an afterthought. A few endpoints here, some webhooks there, and you're left duct-taping everything together. Cal.com is different. Their API is the product. Everything you can do in the UI,