I've spent 8 years building backend systems, and most of that time I've been the person who also has to deploy them, watch them, and get woken up when they break.
That combination changed how I build. I don't design a system and hand it over. I ask: how does this fail, what does it cost to run, and can someone else maintain it after me.
Lately that has taken me to three places:
Serverless and edge - I built Blip, an open-source uptime monitoring platform that runs entirely on one Cloudflare Worker with D1. No servers, no containers. It monitors my clients, my projects, and my homelab, and it costs $0/month.
Operational tooling - ChronoStash, an open-source backup platform for Postgres, MySQL and MongoDB to any S3-compatible storage. Scheduled, encrypted, with restore that actually works. I built it because I learned the hard way what an untested backup is worth.
Local AI - running open models on my own hardware, building agent systems that connect to real business tools instead of demo chatbots.
Stack: Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Cloudflare Workers, Proxmox.
I write here about production systems, infrastructure, and what actually breaks. If you're building something in that space, find me on LinkedIn. My DMs are open.