Introduction

It's 2025, AI is seeing widescale adoption, people can't live without their phones, and the government is stealing your data. It's an impressive sight to see what used to be science fiction as a daily necessity. Despite all this however, the common folk have an aversion to working these technologies, and would defer them to specialists and engineers. It makes sense, as even after working in tech for about a decade there's still so much I don't understand and so much I probably don't want to.

Companies know this, and gladly do the "dirty" work for you. This used to be fine, in the age of CDs and license keys. Nowadays, depending on what you do for a living, you'd barely have any work data on your own workstations; the software you use now live on the cloud(s), as companies study your data and every action you do on what we now call Software-as-a-Service or SaaS for short. In other words, you no longer own that piece of software, and your data is at the mercy of its keeper.

Today, almost everything is on the cloud and costs a subscription. A few bucks a month for one license probably wouldn't hurt; but, to keep up with others and save time, our demand for software increases and so do the costs. This point is even heavier for smaller businesses, where workplace speed and efficiency are factors to customer experiences.

As a nerd myself, I enjoy developing and learning more about new technologies, especially those that are open source and self-hosted; as this exposes myself to deploying the solutions to my own problems from the ground up. With what I've learned from my home lab, I'll be sharing the most practical ways to package solutions to everyday problems for the common household and mom-and-pop shop.