I run Sweetness & Light with my wife Tami — a handmade chocolate and confectionery shop in Ferndale, CA that's been part of this town since 1976. We make the candy; I handle everything with a power button.
Ferndale is a small Victorian village on the Lost Coast. It's beautiful, occasionally foggy, and about as far from a tech hub as you can get in the continental US. That's fine by me. Most of what I build runs in the garage.
My family is Azorean — the Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic that most people couldn't place on a map. A lot of the community here in Humboldt County traces back to the Azores, including ours. I like that.
tostecode is the umbrella for things I build that aren't the shop. OpenCart extensions, homelab tools, AI systems, IoT projects — anything that starts as "I have a problem" and ends with something running in a Docker container.
I started selling extensions on the OpenCart marketplace because I needed tools for the shop and built them well enough that others wanted them. Direct sales make more sense than marketplace cuts for everyone involved, so here we are.
I'm not trying to build a software company. I'm trying to build good tools and keep them working. There's a difference.
We've been on OpenCart since 2009. That's a long time to be running the same platform, and it means I know it well — the good parts, the painful parts, and all the places where you have to build something yourself because nothing else quite fits.
The homelab grew from needing a NAS that could handle a large media library without paying Plex a monthly fee. Then it needed a reverse proxy. Then automation. Then an LLM. Now it's a Unraid server with 128GB of RAM, 40+ Docker containers, an OPNsense router, a dedicated inference box with an RTX 3090, and a WireGuard tunnel to the shop. It spiraled in a direction I'm completely comfortable with.
Self-hosting isn't really about saving money, though that's part of it. It's about understanding what you're running, owning your data, and not being beholden to whatever a SaaS company decides to deprecate next quarter.
The short version: Tower (Unraid, i9-11900K, 128GB RAM) for everything persistent, a dedicated Debian box with an RTX 3090 for AI inference, OPNsense for networking, SWAG for reverse proxy, Cloudflare for DNS and DDoS protection, and too much Python.