Paperless-ngx self-hosted document management

Paperless-ngx: Self-Hosted Document Management Without the Vendor Lock-in

TL;DR Paperless-ngx is a self-hosted, open-source document management system that scans, OCRs, and auto-organizes physical paperwork with no subscription fees or vendor lock-in Documents are automatically tagged and filed using custom rules, and the full archive is searchable by text extracted via OCR Self-hosting options include a local NAS, Docker on a server, a cheap cloud VPS, or even a Raspberry Pi - the system is not computationally demanding The primary benefits over commercial alternatives are complete data ownership, zero recurring cost at scale, and suitability for sensitive documents under HIPAA or GDPR It suits document-heavy professionals and privacy-conscious individuals best; casual users with few documents don’t need it The paper stack on your desk is growing again. Medical records mixed with tax documents, utility bills, insurance forms - all of it scattered across a filing cabinet that’s become increasingly harder to navigate. There’s probably some important document you can’t quite remember where you filed it. ...

April 15, 2026 · 6 min · James M
Where Should Documentation Live Banner

Where Should Documentation Actually Live? Thinking Out Loud in the AI Era

TL;DR Documentation sprawl across Confluence, Jira, SharePoint, Google Docs, GitHub, and Miro is not a tool problem - it is a joints problem: the same decision exists in four places, drifting out of sync immediately Three forces constantly pull against each other: source of truth (one canonical home), discoverability (right surface for every audience), and governance (real access control) - optimising for any one breaks the others The proposed shape: docs-as-code for engineering artefacts in Git, collaborative tools for business content, a read-only render layer between them, and an AI-assisted discovery layer across all of it AI tooling weakens the old boundary - a business user can get a summary generated from a markdown master without ever seeing the file, and an engineer can draft an ADR pulling context from Confluence and Jira automatically Several genuine open questions remain unsolved: versioning across boundaries, who owns the render pipeline, and whether Jira tickets as documents should be formalised or fought against This post is me thinking out loud. It is not a proposal, not a recommended pattern, and possibly not even a useful framing. I am writing it because I am actively stuck on the question, and writing in public tends to be the fastest way I find out what I have got wrong. Feel free to disagree with any of it. ...

March 12, 2026 · 11 min · James M