Octopus Technology is three of us and one self-hosted estate — close to thirty services running on hardware we administer, behind a single sign-on provider we wrote ourselves. It started as a Discord bot, which is a less dignified origin than the current list of services makes it sound.
Most of it exists because we wanted the thing and would rather build it than rent it: a music workstation that runs in a browser, grocery pricing that actually compares retailers, an assistant with real tools rather than a chat box. Running it ourselves is the point — it is where the interesting problems live. Nothing teaches you about session invalidation quite like locking yourself out of your own estate.
We lean toward the unglamorous end: two-factor that cannot be skipped, migrations that do not sign everyone out halfway through, tests that pin the bug rather than the implementation, and comments that say why rather than what. Most of that list is on it because we got it wrong first.
We try to be honest in the code about that. A fair amount of what is in these repositories is a note saying an earlier decision was mistaken, left where the next person will actually trip over it rather than quietly tidied away. It is less flattering and it has saved us more time than it has cost.
The projects page has the detail, and its facts are generated from the repositories so it cannot quietly go stale — which the previous version of this site very much had.
Suggestions welcome on the site's GitHub.
