It has been a while since I posted here. Life and the usual professional entropy have kept me occupied, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the strange habit we have of hosting our thoughts on 'rented land.' While services like Medium or Dev.to offer immediate reach, they operate as polished walled gardens. I spent a lot of time studying these dynamics before starting my blog, and the trade-offs—sacrificing architectural control for a 'Follow' button—were simply logically unacceptable for the type of digital world I want to maintain.
Most third-party tools are built for the average use case, which is a polite way of saying they are technically rigid. My requirements weren't exactly 'standard': I needed native-level routing for 6 languages (English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese), precise control over typography and accessibility, and a total absence of third-party script bloat. Trying to force this level of multilingual granularity into standard blogging platforms usually requires heavy, plugin-ridden setups that tank frontend performance and destroy Core Web Vitals. When you use a ready-made platform, you aren't an owner; you’re a tenant. You have no say in the infrastructure, the hidden SEO logic, or the data-tracking policies quietly running in the background while you type.
I view this site as a laboratory for the 'Art of Integration.' In corporate settings, architectural decisions are often suffocated by legacy debt or the slow machinery of committee consensus. Here, I can play with the bleeding edge. By building this platform with Next.js 15 and React 19, I can optimize Server Components, fine-tune hydration, and implement custom logic that would be a nightmare to 'hack' into a generic blogging tool.
To ground that abstraction in reality, here is what a custom build lets me do that ready-made platforms fundamentally block:
This isn’t just a place to store text; it’s a proof of concept. If the aesthetics feel intentional, it’s because they are—every pixel and every line of code had to earn its place. It’s the difference between describing a high-performance system and actually letting someone walk through the implementation.
To be clear: I’m not saying that self-hosting is the 'objectively superior' path for everyone. For many, the convenience of a managed platform is a perfectly valid trade-off. But it’s definitely my type of path. If you value full autonomy over your data and the nuances of your user experience, it’s a path you should probably consider as well.
Platforms rise and fall based on shifting business models and boardroom whims. By owning both the data and the presentation, I ensure this digital space remains stable and independent of external algorithms. It’s about building a foundation that is predictable, permanent, and—above all—sovereign.
The foundation is laid; now it’s time to build.
