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Tet, Technical Grit, and the Reality of Bootstrapping

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! 🎊 Happy Lunar New Year!

As Tet approaches, Hanoi is transforming. Like most families, mine will be traveling to meet relatives and celebrate the New Year. For me, this means making a difficult but necessary "off" switch for Skill-Wanderer.

🎯 The Sacrifice Behind the Mission

Building a non-profit from the ground up requires more than just code; it requires real sacrifice. I moved away from a high-salary corporate career to build this platform and support my partners through their own "hardship to victory" journeys.

While I am proud of our progress, the reality is that my current income is nowhere near my previous salary. Expensive cloud hosting—which our platform desperately needs—is a luxury we simply cannot afford yet.

💻 Engineering on a Budget: 16 CPUs and 64GB at Home

To keep Skill-Wanderer alive and free, I've had to be my own data center. I run a robust self-hosted environment in a corner of my home using:

A 1Gbps home fiber connection (Hanoi has incredible internet!)
An Orange Pi 5 Plus and an old laptop (which has already survived one fan replacement)
Total Capacity: 16 CPUs and 64GB RAM

📸 My humble home data center powering Skill-Wanderer

Our Kubernetes (K8s) infrastructure is heavy. It consistently consumes a minimum of 4 CPUs and 16GB RAM, with peaks reaching 6 CPUs and 30GB of RAM.

🌙 Why We Are Going Dark (Feb 7 – Feb 22)

Because I am self-hosting on consumer hardware that requires physical maintenance and supervision, I cannot leave it running while I am away. For fire safety and hardware longevity, I will be shutting down the Skill-Wanderer servers for the duration of the holiday.

There are "free" cloud tiers out there, but our 30GB RAM peaks are far beyond what any free service provides. Moving this much horsepower to the cloud right now would create a bill we aren't ready to pay.

🚀 Looking Ahead

This shutdown is a temporary pause. After the holiday, my priority is to find a sustainable path forward through grants, donations, or fiscal hosting so that we never have to "go dark" for a holiday again.

I'll be back and Skill-Wanderer will be online again on February 22nd.

🧧✨ Wishing everyone a safe, warm, and prosperous Lunar New Year!

While our server is offline for the Tet holiday, you can still reach me at quan.nguyen@skill-wanderer.com for any urgent questions. Response times might be slower than usual as I'll be spending time with family, but I'll do my best to help!