Zed is not a fork of VS Code. It is one of the few genuine new editors in the last few years. Written in Rust and much smoother than VS Code and its forks.
For this you avoid AWS, Azure and GCP. Their pricing is simply not competitive. We operate root servers at Hetzner serving dynamic content to six-figure audiences.
PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch clusters can be operated at a fraction of the cost of comparable managed services offered by the major cloud providers.
The idea that this necessarily involves excessive maintenance effort is nonsense.
The skills needed to use hyperscalers properly are better invested in fundamental sysadmin know-how.
I really enjoyed The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. It’s sharp, opinionated, and unusually concrete about how state capacity, technology, and institutional competence intersect in practice. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, it’s a book that forces clearer thinking about power, technology, and governance.