30 days of solo dev shipping: 9 projects, 1 VPS, no Docker — what I actually learned

I'm a solo dev. Over the last 30 days I shipped 9 distinct projects on a single $5 Hetzner VPS, all running concurrently, all publicly accessible right now. Total Docker containers: zero. Total Postgres processes: zero. Total cumulative downtime: zero. This is a retrospective. Not a Show HN, not a launch announcement, not a "look at my projects" gallery. I want to write down what I actually learned doing this — the bets that paid off, the bets that humbled me, and the framework I converged on by accident around day 12. If you're a solo dev who keeps reading "ultimate stack for indie hackers" posts and thinking "but I just want to ship something already", this is for you. The 9 projects in one paragraph A cross-exchange perpetual futures funding rate scanner across 20 venues (data SaaS, the primary product). A stdlib-only CLI for unified cron and systemd timer observability (an OSS dev tool). An info-product book of 30 production-tested patterns for shipping side projects on a $5 VPS. A