> The backend: from simple to absurdly complex...
> Here's where the real inversion happened...
> 2011 stack: PHP...
> 2026 stack: Next.js...
Have you ever checked out Laravel at all, considering your Rest API endpoint even?
And why use Docker in Production of personal projects that are supposed to be used for high load? Why not deploy on a finite VPS/VDS environment existing explicitly for this single workflow? Why add a separate layer in already isolated environment?
Regarding Docker, we have quite a bit running on a single EC2 instance: PostgreSQL with PostGIS (about 13 million rows), Redis, Nginx, theAPI and web app. Using Docker Compose lets us keep everything versioned and spin up or redeploy the whole stack in seconds. Without it,we'd dealing with dependencies manually, and that's where things tend to get messy fast.
It's even easier with Inertiajs
The tradeoff was deliberate though. Serving 261 countries in 4 languages with an API and MCP Server pushes you toward structure over personality. But I do miss some of that original energy.
The posts rationalization of getting out of the way of the content makes sense and if there is the primary motivation it is perfectly rational.
But as a human user: I would like to explore the web again.
We're trying to keep some of that. You can browse countries, compare them, explore cities, look up universities. It's not just an API docs page. But I hear you. :)
The site runs in 4 languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian) and covers 261 countries. Back in 2011 we relied on the machine translators available at the time, you probably remember how rough those were for the end user. AI finally lets us produce content that people can actually read in their language without those painful translation artifacts.
I apologize if that's off-putting, but the alternative would be less content for fewer people, or content full of bad translations.
That said, honestly, the ecosystem momentum probably influenced the decision more than a strict technical comparison. Looking back, we probably weren't critical enough about whether we actually needed to move away from PHP. It works and we're happy with it, but I wouldn't claim it was the only valid choice.
And hey, in my experience the best blogs I've ever read were the "ugly" ones, turns out what make a blog beautiful is usually the writing, not the CSS. Looking forward to it.