Alternatives
Products that do what I wrote a book about self-hosting for a small group of friends/family does
If you're not yet self-hosting or looking to adjust your self-hosting setup, you might find it useful. Edit: The ebook is available now for purchase/download. Earlier beta was mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40269993
- 1IW
Hey folks. Last year I was fortunate enough to sign a deal to write a book with my favorite technical publisher, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. When I started out as an Engineering Manager many years ago, I found that there wasn't a huge amount of material that specifically and practically helped me understand how to do my job. When you learn to program there's all of these amazing tutorials, examples and guides, but what was there for new managers? In response to this, a couple of years ago I started a blog over at https://www.theengineeringmanager.com which got a decent amount of…
2020
- 2IW
2021 · deploymentfromscratch.com
- 3TC
Looking to get some feedback from the Hacker News community. I wrote the book with a focus on penetration testers and red teamers, but there are great examples for network admins, developers, and blue team defenders as well. You can pick up a copy for free here through May 19, 2019: https://gumroad.com/l/the_cyber_plumbers_handbook/hackernews... Please note, because it's hosted on Gumroad, it does require an email. If you don't want to give out your actual email, check out an anonymous email service. I give it away to students for free, so if you know of one that…
2019
- 4

- 5SD
Hey fellow HN-ers, I'd like to ask HN about my latest startup: SocialFolders. We take a Dropbox-like approach to managing your content on your social networks by mirroring all the content you have on these networks in folders on your computer. Moving this content around, between folders or between services, is mirrored in the all-mighty "cloud" (ugh, I hate this word). We'd love to know what you think. We think our approach solves the problem of managing content at scale. We put together a quick 2'30 screencast to show HN how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ If you want…
2012
- 6IP
Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…
2024 · leanpub.com
- 7IM
Hey HN, I'm so excited to finally share with you what I've been working on recently. One month ago I asked my audience what they wanted to learn about Websites, APIs and Servers security [0]. From the feedback, I've identified a few recurring pain points that I've started to address (and many more) in this new book. From theory to practice, you will learn how low-level network and security protocols work. How to configure Cloudflare to secure and scale your web applications. How to create serverless applications and which database to chose with serverless functions. How to optimize your…
2023 · kerkour.com
- 8MT
2011 · pragprog.com
- 9AS
Hi HN, I'm Alon, and I'm building Alien, an open-source platform for deploying your software into your customer's environment and keeping it fully managed. In my previous startup, I heard the same question from every single enterprise customer over and over again: "My data is sensitive. Can I deploy your product to my own cloud account?" Self-hosting is becoming very popular because it lets users keep their data private, local, and inside their own environment. Unfortunately, self-hosting breaks down when someone starts paying for your software. Especially if it's an enterprise customer.…
Apr 2026
- 10HT
2020 · petecodes.io
- 11

- 12MB
Hi, I spent the last year and a half writing a book on Docker and microservices, which was finally released on O'Reilly this week. "Using Docker: Developing and Deploying Software with Containers" takes a holistic approach, showing how containers can be used as the central artifact in a modern software development workflow. If anyone has any q's or feedback, please feel free to comment below. The book is available at: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035671.do (use code AUTHD for a discount)…
2016
- 13SA
I had the idea to create a dedicated web page containing basic, easy-to-understand digital hygiene advice. So if a friend or relative asks you for advice on securing their digital lives, you can simply give them a link and hopefully they'll share it with their friends too. Hosting is on GitHub pages; just a single, semantic, accessible HTML file. I just made this today, so contributions are welcome, especially right now. I am not a security researcher, so if anyone finds an issue with what I've written in this first draft, or thinks some other point deserves mentioning, please tell me either…
2020
- 14IW
2013 · owncloudbook.com
- 15AG
Here it is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T8R91jWhQK9t7IwQGngDDLFavJ2LTNtlntThgQPS0Uo/edit?usp=sharing Feel free to add articles to the suggestions section, and I will review them and add to the document! Any and all feedback is accepted!
2015
- 16SH
website: dashboard.io I've been thinking about this idea for a while now and finally got around to building the prototype this weekend. The idea is that you'd drop my JS snippet on your site and I'd start building the "AARRR" table (which I'm actually building this week but imagine slide 4: http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version). Basically, the system will build that table out for you and then show you how your startup stacks up against others in your space. To be clear, I'll never share your data with anyone. So, if you're a "hosting" company, I'd…
2011
- 17IW
Hello! I just published a book on Site Reliability Engineering. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QNZC2LL This book is a collection of 28 chapters on SRE concepts, such as observability, monitoring, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), alerting, resilience and debugging. I adapted each chapter from blog posts I've written over the last 4 years. Most of the chapters detailed concepts that I applied while working at $dayjob, so they are 100% proven in real business settings :) ------ Some info on the backstory. Last year I started writing a book on my software development…
2022
- 18IB
Recently moved all of my apps to a $4/mo VPS using Coolify Saved tons of $$, and can self-host my Ghost/Wordpress/Postgres instances etc. Built a tool to help others do the same
2024 · indiehost.io
- 19IW
Hey HN, I wrote a book teaching beginner web app development using Django, launching on May 4th (successfully Kickstarted last year.) Website: http://hellowebapp.com Highlights: - Aimed at people who have previous HTML/building websites experience. - Template-first development: see the web app as a website first, before setting up databases and models. - Generic “collection of things” tutorial. Readers are encouraged to create something using this rubric that means something to them (a blog, a directory of people, etc.) Adding creativity will make the material stick better. -…
2015
- 20WS
2025 · lab.workhub.so
- 21IM
Hey HN, I'm Aydin, a 13-year-old developer and indie maker looking to improve the world with my small startups. Recently, I built 2 micro SaaS projects. I spent days & weeks coding features, always telling myself that after coding one more feature I was for sure to get traction. This never happened. The reason: I never launched. With IndieReq, you can launch your startup fast and get real user feedback so you know exactly what features to ship and improve. All you have to do is sign up for free, create a feedback board, and share the public link with your users. It's that easy! If you've…
2025 · indiereq.com
- 22IM
Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com
- 23WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 24IT
I created http://devtest.net as a weekend project, and I'm pretty proud of it from a technical and UI standpoint. The problem is, I've built this by myself in a bit of a vacuum, to "scratch my own itch", and I don't know if this is useful to anyone other than me. I'm also not so hot on the business side and don't really know what I'm doing. Basically, I'm looking for some advice, now that I've actually launched, what now? One thing that this has shown me is that I'm capable of putting together a pretty decent web application on my own in my spare time. Should I stick with this idea, or…
2012
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