Folks who do what I do don't seem to have much of an online water cooler, aside from some National Co-op Grocer forums which are restricted access. Do check out ncg.coop though.

That said, I'll take the word of encouragement that maybe a blog would be interesting. You can do some really fun things at smaller businesses because it's fine if it doesn't scale. I can actually save us money by 3D printing or laser cutting things myself, and have done some fun projects around that. A lot of the tech projects I do are pretty much solo endeavors, which is challenging but also rewarding - that self-hosted project you tried out at home will almost certainly be robust enough for work. I'm one of two people here who write code at all, so I get to make pretty much all of the architectural decisions myself, and even a shitty Bash script is probably still 10x better than whatever process existed before. I also manage our product and marketing teams (did I mention it's a small business, lol?), which means I get to shape our message and values, and even be our taste-tester-in-chief.