Another frequent transit user here. When people complain that I’m early for something, I like to tell them that, since I ride transit, my choices are to be early or late, but I can’t choose to be on time. 😅

I’ve tried a few of these, and I’ve never found one that doesn’t feel like I’m inviting a sales rep to live on my home server. They’re technically open source, but it’s obvious their primary purpose in this form is to upsell you. I understand it, but it’s just not what I want so I’ve ended up getting rid of each one after tinkering with them for a while.

I guess the same could be said for n8n, but I find it more tolerable. I have set up a Valkey instance though and use it for persistent storage through n8n’s Redis support. That works well enough for my fairly limited use case.

I moved from the city I grew up in and gave away my car on the way out. That was in 2017, and I haven’t owned a car since. I drive extremely rarely — used to rent a car for a few hours every couple of months to run this or that errand in the Pacific Northwest US. I’ve since moved to a larger city with better transit on the US east coast. I live in the center city and can’t imagine any reason I would need to drive at this point. It’s been a few years since I’ve driven a car.

How practical it is will depend heavily on your lifestyle and where you live. If you’re in most parts of the US, the default assumption is that you will drive a car, and you will be excluded from many things if you don’t. If you already live in a place that is conducive, are willing to move to a place that is, or can otherwise structure your life in such a way that doesn’t require it, you can absolutely do it. There are certainly trade-offs, but you couldn’t pay me enough money to go back to a car-centric life.

My brother used to work for an SEO company. They charged clients to have their web sites on directories which would improve their Google pagerank… until Google updated the algorithm to penalize sites listed in these directories. The company quickly pivoted to charging the same clients to have them removed from the directories they had just charged them to be listed in.