This blog didn't start polished. It started as an idea a place to document the work, the lessons, and the season I'm in. But building the container turned out to be its own story worth telling. And it took me a whole month. A whole freaking month. The blog is built on Next.js. Not a template, not a starter kit a real application with its own config, its own structure, and its own set of problems to solve. Early on I was using SQLAlchemy as the ORM layer. It made sense at the time familiar, flexible, and I'd used it in my Flask projects. But it introduced friction I didn't want. Abstraction on top of abstraction, and it started to feel like I was fighting the stack instead of building with it. So I made the call to switch directly to PostgreSQL. Raw, clean, and honest. No middleman. Yes, I could have just kept SQLAlchemy. No, I will not be taking questions. Hosting the database was the next decision. I went with Vercel Postgres keeping everything under one roof. The database, the deployment, the environment variables all in one place. That kind of cohesion matters when you're a solo developer managing multiple projects. It meant I could push a change and trust that everything would talk to each other the way it was supposed to. Simple in theory. Absolutely not in practice. The next.config.js file became the heartbeat of the project. Image domains, environment handling, build configuration it's where the decisions live. Getting it right took iteration. A lot of it. More than I'd like to admit on a public blog. But once it clicked, the whole app felt solid. What I built is simple on the surface. A home page. Posts. An about page. An admin login. But underneath it, there's a real database storing real data, a deployment pipeline that works, and a configuration I understand from top to bottom. Was it supposed to take a month? Probably not. But that's how it went and I'd do it again.