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.

Authentik

Authentik vs Authelia vs Keycloak: Choosing the Right Self-Hosted Identity Provider in 2026

If you're self-hosting applications in 2026, you've probably hit the authentication wall. Every app wants its own login. Your users are drowning in passwords. And you're one data breach away from a very bad week. The solution is an identity provider: a central system

Headless CMS

The Headless CMS Revolution: Why Enterprises Are Taking Back Control of Their Content

Enterprise content teams are having an uncomfortable realization: they don't actually own their content. Sure, they pay for it. They create it. They publish it. But when that content lives on a SaaS platform's servers, subject to their terms of service and pricing whims, "ownership&

self-hosting

Self-Hosting in 2026: Why the $85B Market Boom Changes Everything

Something interesting happened to the self-hosting market in 2026. It stopped being a niche hobby and became a legitimate business strategy. The numbers tell the story: the self-hosting market is projected to reach $85.2 billion by 2034, up from $15.6 billion in 2024. That's a compound

Guacamole

Guacamole + LDAP: Set Up Secure Remote Access for Your Entire Team

Remote access is one of those problems that sounds simple until you're managing 50 employees who all need to connect to different machines. TeamViewer wants $50/user/month. AnyDesk's pricing is a mystery. And your security team keeps asking about audit logs. Apache Guacamole solves this

Airflow

Why Your Business Needs Workflow Automation (And How Airflow Replaces Expensive Tools)

Your team probably runs dozens of repetitive tasks every week. Someone exports a report from one system, reformats it, and uploads it to another. Someone else checks if yesterday's data sync completed, then sends a Slack message to confirm. Another person manually triggers the same sequence of API

Databases

pgvector vs ChromaDB: When to Extend PostgreSQL and When to Go Dedicated

Every developer building AI applications faces this question: should I add vector search to my existing PostgreSQL database, or spin up a dedicated vector database like ChromaDB? The answer depends on what you're building. Let me break it down. What's the Actual Difference? pgvector is a

RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ + Node.js: Build Resilient Event-Driven Microservices with Dead Letter Queues

Message processing fails. It happens. A downstream API times out, a database connection drops, or your code hits an edge case nobody anticipated. The question is: what happens to that message? Without proper error handling, failed messages either disappear forever or block your entire queue. Dead Letter Queues solve this

Discourse

Discourse + SSO: Implement Single Sign-On with OAuth2 and OIDC

Managing separate logins for your community forum is a headache nobody asked for. Your users already have accounts in your main app, your CRM, or your identity provider. Making them create yet another password for Discourse is friction you can eliminate. Discourse ships with solid SSO support out of the

Taiga

Why Your Team Should Ditch Jira for Taiga

Your project management tool shouldn't cost more than some of your team members. But if you're running Jira for a growing team, you've probably noticed the bills climbing faster than your sprint velocity. Here's the uncomfortable math: Jira Standard runs $7.91/

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