Curated insights and essential tools for the modern operational team.
'For much of modern history, power was a two-pronged game between business and politics. But recent events show technology is no longer a tool for power. It is power itself.'
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People keep asking us if it's too late to learn coding. We've been building software for over 20 years. Our answer: today is always a great time to start.
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We built four AI agents, each with a completely different personality. Here's what we learned about persona engineering and why giving an AI a 'soul' matters more than giving it knowledge.
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I used to manage teams of 20-25 engineers to build complex ERP systems. In 2025, I had to let them all go. Today, I build the same systems — alone, with AI — for under $100 a month in tooling. Here's exactly how.
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Most AI chatbots are glorified FAQ pages. An AI Receptionist is something different — a digital team member with a personality, objectives, deep business knowledge, and hard safety boundaries. Here's exactly how we engineered ours.
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We've migrated our primary AI coding tool three times in 18 months. Cursor to Claude Code to Antigravity. Here's what broke, what improved, and the non-obvious lessons about AI-assisted development that no changelog will tell you.
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'Six months after launching our website on Svelte 5 and Directus, here is what changed: we dropped Directus entirely, moved to Turso and static markdown files checked into Git, launched an AI Receptionist service, and adopted a fully agentic development workflow driven by Antigravity.'
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In early 2026, Alpha Bits hosted an AI Workflow Automation workshop for a group of operational leaders from the Shopee team. A pre-workshop survey revealed a critical insight: while most participants used AI daily, they were heavily bottlenecked by 'data paralysis'.
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AI tools change every week. Your data doesn't. This is the thinking framework that took us from extracting SQL patterns to accidentally getting a US patent on an energy storage system — and why your data context matters more than any prompt trick.
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Our servers were attacked on Vietnamese New Year 2026 by a Vietnamese Botnet. Discover how our team and Brian AI patched the 'i love u' malware within hours.
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Developers are spending $200-$500/month on AI coding tools. Here's my entire stack — IDE, terminal, research, image gen, audio, video — for under $100. With exact prices, what each tool does, and why I stopped paying for the expensive ones.
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The HomeLab series finale — where our infrastructure is heading next. AI-assisted development running on local GPU, the Alpha Block robotics platform, I.C.E. Battery's acceptance into NUS Enterprise BLOCK71, and why our $2,100 hardware investment has already paid for itself many times over.
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'After three years of deploying every interesting Docker container I could find, here are the applications that actually earn their keep: Node-RED (the nervous system of everything), InfluxDB + Grafana (IoT data + dashboards), and a handful of tools that power real client work.'
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I've tried Portainer, raw Docker Compose, and even cursed at the Docker CLI. Then I found CasaOS, and it changed how our entire team deploys services. Here's why it became our go-to for everything from client demos to production IoT dashboards.
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'How we achieved networking nirvana — all our devices talking securely across locations, accessible from Hoi An cafés, client offices, and everywhere in between. ZeroTier + Cloudflare DNS + Cloudflare Tunnel. Total cost: $12/year.'
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Why don't we just use a single powerful server? Because different workloads have different needs. Here's our full hardware breakdown — Raspberry Pi 4s, Orange Pi Zeros, Radxa boards, and a GPU server — with real costs, real failures, and the philosophy behind mixing everything.
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I took apart my first wireless router as a teenager, amazed that tiny Bits could travel thousands of miles through the air. 20 years later, I'm still building infrastructure — just with Raspberry Pis, Orange Pis, and Docker. Here's why every developer should build their own lab.
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'How we built the Alpha Bits website using Svelte 5, Directus, and Trae IDE with MCP integrations — the same workflow we use for client projects. Open-source, near-zero hosting cost, and entirely visible on GitHub.'
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After 20+ years of driving DX projects across startups, SMEs, and enterprises, here's what I wish every CXO understood before starting: data comes before AI, process change matters more than tools, and your Zalo group chat is not a knowledge management system.
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We've deployed AI customer service agents for F&B businesses in Vietnam. Not the '10x your revenue' pitch — here's what these systems actually handle, where they fail, and why you don't need an ERP or CRM to start.
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A Vietnamese coffee chain with 200+ outlets was running 5 different POS systems and couldn't answer basic questions about their own business. Here's how we consolidated everything into BigQuery and what we learned about data transformation in the real world.
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We've run Node-RED on everything from Raspberry Pi 4s monitoring greenhouses to Android phones via Termux. Here's what works, what doesn't, and the performance tricks that prove you don't need expensive hardware to build real IoT automation.
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'The technical deep-dive into I.C.E. Battery — how cold energy storage actually works, and how we built a distributed IoT monitoring system using Node-RED, MQTT, ZeroTier, and Cloudflare Tunnel that runs across multiple physical sites on the same HomeLab infrastructure we use for everything else.'
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How a 'contingency plan-Z' became a US-patented cold energy storage system accepted into NUS Enterprise BLOCK71 Singapore. The I.C.E. Battery story — from sand battery pivot to a cooling solution for one of the world's hottest cities.
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'The complete technical breakdown of sand battery thermal energy storage — 98% conversion efficiency, 300°C storage, and the science that led to a US patent (No. 12-130086-B1). From our 2022 balcony prototype to the three-stage process that makes it work.'
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'In 2022, I set up a thermal energy storage experiment on my Saigon apartment balcony. That one experiment — sand, heat, sensors, and a lot of patience — would lead to a US patent, a cold energy startup, and the entire AIoT practice at Alpha Bits. This is the origin story.'
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We just registered a company called Alpha Bits. Here's why — and what we think the next few years of technology will look like for builders like us in Southeast Asia.
Read more → In 2025, we went from asking AI to draft emails to deploying agents that read, classify, respond, and log interactions on their own. Here's what that shift looked like in practice — from our own projects, not a vendor pitch.
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