9 posts on development, learning, and building things.
dockerizing a turborepo monorepo for local development with hot reload — go/gin + next.js + postgres
i'd been deploying go backends on ec2 and pushing next.js to vercel. docker kept showing up everywhere, so i finally sat down with it. cli, dockerfiles, compose, and the mental model that actually stuck.
deploying my first real backend to ec2 accidentally turned into a deep dive into reverse proxies, load balancers, scaling, replicas, private ips, and what a "server" actually is.
i didn't switch to go because it was trending. i switched because i wanted to understand what was actually happening. here's what two months of building a real e-commerce backend taught me.
i'd been on render for every project. it was comfortable, it just worked. then a client project pushed me to ec2 and i learned more in one day than i had in weeks of reading docs.
i knew express. i was comfortable. so why did i throw myself into go, a language that made me question everything i thought i knew about backend dev? honest story.
nobody tells you that university and self-taught development are almost completely separate tracks. here's what actually worked for me and what didn't.
after years in the js world and recently diving into go, i have thoughts. not hot takes — just honest observations from someone who's lived in both.
everyone's either saying ai will replace developers or that it's useless hype. here's what it actually looks like to use ai tools daily as a student developer building real projects.