A few weeks ago, we officially registered Alpha Bits as a company in Ho Chi Minh City. On paper, it's a technology consultancy. In practice, it's something we've been doing informally for years — building things with digital technology, learning obsessively, and sharing what we find.
This post is our attempt to say, out loud, what Alpha Bits is and what we think it could become. We don't have a five-year business plan or a pitch deck. We have a point of view and a balcony full of experiments.
What "Alpha Bits" Means
The name is simple: the alphas in digital bits.
We've always been drawn to digital technology — the raw bits of information that move through networks, power software, and increasingly shape how businesses and communities operate. "Alpha" is our ambition: to be early, to be good, and to be honest about what we know and don't know.
I took apart my first wireless router as a teenager, amazed that these tiny bits could travel thousands of miles through the air. That curiosity never went away. It just got more expensive.
Why Now?
Honestly, we could have started this company three years ago or three years from now. The timing isn't strategic — it's practical. We've accumulated enough experience, enough projects, and enough scars from real deployments that it felt dishonest to keep doing this as a side thing.
But there's something else. We're watching a few shifts that we think will define the next few years of technology work, and we want to put our bets on record:
AI Will Shrink Teams, Not Replace Them
We're not talking about the headlines — "AI will replace developers" or "AI will revolutionise business." We mean something more specific and, we think, more disruptive: the tooling is approaching a point where a small, skilled team — maybe even one person with the right tools — could do work that previously required fifteen or twenty people.
I've run ERP teams of 20-25 engineers. Technology leaders, designers, frontend, backend, mobile, QA, DevOps, the full stack of humans. I have a gut feeling that this model has maybe three or four years left before something fundamentally changes. The AI coding assistants today are crude, but they're improving at a rate that makes me uncomfortable in the best way.
If we're right, Alpha Bits is designed for that world — a small team that punches absurdly above its weight. If we're wrong, we'll still have built a great consultancy. The bet costs us nothing.
Something Interesting Is Happening in Energy
Completely unrelated to software, I've been running a thermal energy storage experiment on my Saigon apartment balcony since late last year. Sand, heat, sensors, Node-RED, a lot of patience. The idea — storing energy as heat in ordinary sand — sounds ridiculous. Maybe it is.
But the data is interesting. The monitoring system we're building around it, using cheap IoT sensors and open-source tools on Raspberry Pis, is showing us something real. If the numbers hold, this could lead somewhere unexpected. Patents, maybe. Products, maybe. A completely new direction for the company that has nothing to do with software consulting, maybe.
I don't want to oversell it. Most experiments fail. This one might sit on the balcony for years before anything comes of it, or it might go nowhere at all. But the process of rigging it with sensors, collecting data, and analysing it methodically — that's teaching us things about IoT development that no textbook would. The side effects of curiosity are rarely wasted.
Southeast Asia Is Underpriced
The talent here — especially in Vietnam — is remarkable relative to the global market. But more importantly, the problems here are interesting. Manufacturers still running on spreadsheets. F&B chains with 200 outlets and no unified data layer. E-commerce operations held together with messaging apps and prayer.
These aren't boring problems. They're exactly the kind of messy, real-world challenges that teach you things no tutorial ever will. We're betting that companies here will increasingly need people who can build systems from first principles, not just configure off-the-shelf products.
The digital nomad infrastructure is getting better too. I've been writing code from Hoi An cafe shops overlooking lantern-lit rivers, from balconies above rice paddies, from tiny wooden tables squeezed between scooters. You can live well here and do serious work. That combination will attract more builders to this part of the world, and we want to be part of that community.
Open Source Has Won (Almost)
Not in the "everything is free" sense, but in the "transparent systems are harder to compromise and easier to trust" sense. We've built serious infrastructure — IoT monitoring, data pipelines, automation workflows — on open-source stacks that cost less per year than a single enterprise software license costs per month.
Our current HomeLab runs on about $2,100 in hardware and $12/year in networking costs. That's Raspberry Pis, Orange Pis, a dedicated server, ZeroTier, Cloudflare. The whole thing. It hosts our own services, prototyping environments, and may soon handle client workloads.
We think more businesses will figure this out. When they do, they'll need people who already know how these tools work in production — people who've endured the crashes, the config drift, and that one time a Node-RED flow melted wiring because of a missing safety character. We are those people. Unfortunately.
What Kind of Company Is This?
We're builders who happen to run a business, not a business that happens to employ builders.
That distinction matters because it shapes everything: who we hire, what projects we take, and how we spend our time. Our people need hard problems. If a project doesn't teach us something new, it probably isn't the right project for us. That might sound idealistic — and maybe it is — but so far, the most profitable work we've done has also been the most technically challenging. We're betting that correlation holds.
We also don't want to be just an agency. We want to organise workshops, run community events, share knowledge openly. Not as a marketing strategy — as an obligation. The tech communities in Ho Chi Minh City and across Vietnam gave us our start. The least we can do is contribute back.
We have a belief that in this new era, code will become cheap enough to give away. If that happens — and we think it will — the value moves from writing code to knowing what to build and why. That's the moat we're investing in.
What's On Our Desks Right Now
Rather than a list of services, here's what's actually happening today:
-
The thermal battery experiment — sand, heat, IoT sensors, data collection on the apartment balcony. Could become a patent. Could become a product. Could become nothing. The data will decide, not us.
-
Data infrastructure for a coffee chain — helping a multi-brand F&B operator in Vietnam unify their data across 200+ outlets. Five different POS systems, none of them talking to each other. The kind of problem that sounds boring until you're knee-deep in it.
-
HomeLab infrastructure — a distributed setup that handles everything from internal services to client prototyping. We'll document this setup in detail eventually. It's the backbone of everything we do, and it cost less than a decent used car.
-
PCB experiments — early-stage tinkering with custom circuit boards for IoT applications. We have an instinct that there's a product somewhere at the intersection of education, IoT, and robotics. The shape of it isn't clear yet. Hardware is hard — there's a reason they don't call it "easiware." Some of these boards will end up in a drawer. Some might end up in something real.
These aren't marquee projects. They're the kind of work that teaches you how technology actually behaves in the real world — messy, surprising, and occasionally beautiful.
What We Believe
A few things we hold to be true. We might be wrong about some of them, but they're guiding our decisions for now:
-
Tools change. Curiosity doesn't. New platforms, frameworks, and models will emerge every quarter. What won't change is our instinct to be the first to try them, experience the frustration of not knowing what we're doing, and come out the other side with working knowledge. That cycle — explore, struggle, master, share — is how we operate.
-
Build first, theorise later. We'd rather show you a working prototype than a presentation deck. If we haven't used something in a real project, we won't write about it as if we have.
-
Data first, opinions second. We've been developing a mindset we loosely call "Data-First Principle Thinking" — the idea that raw data, properly collected and rigorously analysed, will lead you to conclusions that speculation alone never reaches. This mindset applies equally to energy experiments, software architecture, and business strategy. Trust the numbers. Document everything. Let the insights emerge.
-
Transparency is a feature. We publish our code when we can. Not because we're idealists, but because transparent systems are harder to break and easier to maintain. A GitHub link isn't a marketing asset — it's proof that something works.
-
Community is the long game. We don't know exactly what Alpha Bits looks like in five years. But we know that the relationships we build now — with other developers, with local tech communities, with people who are as curious as we are — will matter more than any client contract.
What's Next
We're going to keep building. We're going to write about what we build — the things that work, the things that don't, and the lessons we learn along the way. This blog is where that happens.
Some of our experiments will fail publicly. Some will stall in the prototyping stage for months or years — that's the nature of invention. Some, we hope, will break through into something worth sharing with the world. We won't pretend to know in advance which ones are which.
If you're a builder, a tinkerer, or someone who just likes reading about how technology works in the real world, stick around. We don't promise polished thought leadership or quarterly trend reports. We promise honest stories from people who are actually doing the work.
If you're a business with a messy technology problem you don't know how to solve — that's exactly the kind of conversation we like having. Not because we have all the answers, but because figuring it out is the whole point.
Alpha Bits. Builders first. Always curious.
This post was written during the first week of Alpha Bits' existence. We're a small team in Ho Chi Minh City with strong opinions about technology and no idea how this will turn out. Check back to see if we were right about anything.