Best Tools
Everything in the directory is catalogued. These are the ones that earned a full write-up — deep reviews with setup notes, trade-offs, and a straight verdict, not a features list.
Backstage Is Worth It — Past a Certain Team Size
Running Backstage as a platform team's central catalog: the payoff, the real cost of ownership, and when it's premature.
Why Terraform Is Still the Default IaC Choice
Where Terraform earns the default pick, and where the BSL license and state overhead actually bite.
Grafana Is the Right Default Dashboard Layer — With One Caveat
A season of running Grafana + Prometheus in production: where it earns the recommendation, and where Datadog still wins on pure time-to-value.
Vaultwarden: The Easiest Self-Hosting Win on This List
A lightweight Bitwarden-compatible vault server that took under 10 minutes to stand up and just works.
Plane Review: The Open-Source Linear Alternative, Tested
Self-hosting Plane for a small team — setup time, feature gaps, and whether it's a real Linear substitute.
Gitea: The Right-Sized Git Host for Small Teams
Running Gitea instead of GitLab for a five-person team — what you gain by not needing GitLab's platform scope.