Category
Tools we use daily: setups, tricks and battle-tested automations.
n8n is the low-code automation project that has best adapted to self-hosting. A walk through the real install with Docker Compose, the database and queue decisions to make, and the points where most people trip up the first time.
Dependabot and Renovate chase the same goal with different philosophies. I compare both after years running them on my own and client projects, covering when one fits better and when the other suits a team's workflow more.
Generics arrived in Go in March 2022 with high expectations and some skepticism. Three years on, idiomatic code barely uses them on the surface, but they have transformed deep libraries: type-safe collections, database clients, concurrency primitives. This analysis examines what has taken hold and why.
Aider is an open-source CLI that connects your Git repository to an LLM to refactor code, add features and fix bugs without leaving the terminal. Works with GPT-4o, Claude and local models via Ollama. Every change generates an automatic commit with a descriptive message, integrating natively into the Git workflow.
OpenTofu reached GA in January 2024 as an open-source Terraform fork under MPL 2.0, with Linux Foundation governance. Six months later, it is a stable drop-in replacement: same configs, same state format, same CLI. Version 1.7 adds native state encryption, the first real technical edge over Terraform.
LM Studio is a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux that downloads and runs large language models on your own machine, with a polished chat interface and no terminal required. It includes an OpenAI-compatible API and RAG with your documents. For individual use it beats Ollama on user experience; for teams or production, OpenWebUI, vLLM, or TGI are the better fit.
With quantization, model weights are stored with fewer bits (4, 5, or 8 instead of 16), so Llama 2 13B shrinks from 26 GB to about 7.5 GB. With llama.cpp it runs on an ordinary 16GB-RAM laptop with no dedicated GPU, and the quality loss is smaller than intuition suggests.
ChatGPT plugins let the model invoke external services through an OpenAPI specification. Three months after launch, the ecosystem has around 500 plugins with a clear pattern: they work well for live data lookup and internal API exposure, but show friction in multi-plugin orchestration and real-money transactions.
GitHub Copilot is a coding assistant from GitHub and OpenAI that suggests code in real time inside the editor, trained on billions of lines of public code. It speeds up repetitive tasks such as tests, boilerplate, and documentation, but its suggestions always need human review before reaching production.
