Day 1. Platform is Up!

I have spent years building other people’s products. My own work sat in private repositories and in a portfolio that died the way they all die: designed once, shipped once, then left alone, because changing one line in it meant redoing everything from scratch. This is the first day of my real portfolio, and the first honest thing to say about it is that the site is not the project. The site is the surface. Under it is a platform I intend to keep deliberately maintaining — a monorepo of architectural experiments.

## What is actually running today

Three applications and a set of shared packages. web is this site — Next.js on React, full SSR, English and Ukrainian since the first commit. api is NestJS on Fastify over PostgreSQL 16. dashboard is a Vue single-page admin, and it is what publishes everything here: the words you are reading are a row in a database, not a file I redeployed. That is the whole reason this was a rebuild and not a redesign.

The combinations I wanted to try

The showcase is an Astro app that renders React and Vue on the same page — the same component twice, in two frameworks, next to each other. It reuses the constants and the components from the Next.js site, so moving between two separate applications reads as one site rather than a hand-off. It exists in the repository and it is not linked from here yet, because today only the parts I consider ready are exposed. Maybe that makes the platform look less presentable, but I do not care.

Colour tokens and constants live in one shared package. Eight palettes, dark and light themes, and no component holds a hex value: a theme is a set of tokens, and a component that hard-codes a colour does not survive review. The same logic works in React and in Vue, both packs standardized inside and out. The Vue dashboard has its own rendering quirks, but it stays fully in sync with the Astro and Next.js apps the front end is built from.

How it gets built

I work with AI agents on this repository every day, and the method turned out to matter more than the model. It is spec-driven (SDD): decisions live in specs, not in a chat log. When a change to one spec invalidates something else, that consequence is filed as a numbered checkbox — and a script refuses the commit if it was not. Consequences written as prose get read once and then ignored; I have the burns that taught me to document and to think ahead. Every commit goes through the real gate, lint through build, and then the hooks. Nothing lands because an agent reported success. On top of that, every decision, problem and task is logged in full, with the task routing spread across Gemini, Haiku, Sonnet, Opus and Fable.

The monorepo is arranged so that the shared dependencies between applications are checked by the build. Anything two apps must agree on lives in a package with a single owner, each workspace carries its own tests, and a change re-runs the workspaces it actually touches. A solid, dynamic arrangement — and it is what makes a one-person platform survivable.

What is coming

The backend plan is plug-and-work: modules that install into the dashboard as bricks with a meter for processor and memory load, each owning its own schema, each removable and freeing its resources on the way out. The first ones are specced and waiting:

- an SMM publisher that drafts, schedules and posts on its own, leaving me as the editor rather than the operator

- an EVE Online planetary-industry helper — the calculation I got tired of doing on paper

- an open-source opportunity scanner that reads my real projects folder and points me at issues I am actually qualified to fix

More will follow, along with the showcase pieces that are not ready to be shown. They will land here, one at a time, in public.

Edutorium

The one I care about most is not a product. Edutorium is a web and mobile application I am building to help me study — specifically, to make me verify the code an AI writes for me instead of trusting it. It is designed around how I learn, not around a market, and it has exactly one user by design. If it turns out you like the way I study, I will gladly share it. That is the only user research it is going to get.

This site will change often, and the changing is the point. The repository is the changelog; the posts here are the reasoning. Day one is only the beginning — join my small journey into experiments in architecture and self-education.