About
An independent lab building tools for solo developers.
Decennium Labs publishes the systems, methods, and field notes that let one operator run what used to require a team. The work is open in process, opinionated in execution, and honest about what worked and what did not.
Nils Livingston
Founder · sole operator
Years before going solo, I led an operations team as a Team Manager — running people, owning hiring and arbitration decisions, and learning the part no engineering blog teaches: a system is the people running it, and a fast decision you can reverse cleanly beats a perfect one made too late.
On the technical side I am a full-stack developer by training, with deeper formations picked up along the way in AI engineering, systems infrastructure, and applied data. I write production code across the stack — backend services, frontend systems, infrastructure-as-code — and I am moving steadily into DevOps, the natural extension of how I already work.
Combining the operator’s instinct with the builder’s tools is the point of the lab. One person who can both decide and ship moves at a pace most teams cannot match.
I work in French and English fluently, Spanish professionally, and live in Barcelona. Decennium Labs is registered in Estonia.
Where I focus
- · Full-stack engineering
- · DevOps & infrastructure
- · AI-assisted development
- · Team & operations leadership
- · Architecture & decision-making
- · FinOps for small ops
How we work
Three principles.
Practice in public.
Every system is documented as we build it. Wins, mistakes, trade-offs. No retroactive polish.
Optimize for compounding.
We build for ten years, not ten weeks. That changes which shortcuts are acceptable.
Honest trade-offs.
Every choice has a cost. We name it in the same paragraph we describe the benefit.
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- Owned websites
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- Specialized agents
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- Production VPS
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- Persistent memories
Origin
How Decennium Labs came together.
Decennium is Latin for “decade” — from decem (ten) and annus (year). The doubled nn in the wordmark is intentional: it is what the etymology gives you, and it became the typographic signature.
I started building owned websites years ago, on weekends. For a long time the project lived in the margins. Then in late 2025 the agentic tooling crossed a threshold I had been waiting for. The bottleneck shifted — from “hard to ship” to “hard to coordinate.” I built the coordination layer (mono-repo, agent council, persistent memory) and went from 5 sites to 63 in less than six months.
That velocity is what the lab is now about. Not as a feat — as proof that the right composition of open primitives makes a one-person operation seriously productive. We publish the building blocks so others can put their own stack together.
The Estonian OÜ structure was chosen for one reason: I plan to be EU-mobile across the next two years — Spain → France → Portugal — and I needed a corporate home that did not move with me. Estonia gives me that. The work itself stays the same: experiment, ship, write it down.
Practical
Legal entity: Decennium Labs OÜ (in formation, April 2026), Estonia. Operating tax residence: Spain through 2026, transitioning to Portugal. Service contracts welcomed in EU, EEA, UK, Switzerland, Canada, US.