The "Boring" Stack: How an Infra Guy Built a Website
I'm not a web developer. I treated this site like a plumbing project — boring, reliable pieces wired together until it stopped leaking.
I'm not a web developer. Never have been. Spend fifteen years in infrastructure and you'll know your way around a server rack, a routing table, and a runbook — but you'll have zero reason to ever touch CSS.
Yet, here you are, reading this on a site with my name on it. It didn't get here because I finally "learned to code." It got here because I treated a website like a plumbing project: I wired some boring, reliable pieces together until it stopped leaking.
The Stack: Zero Magic
I went pure static. No React, no Next.js, no build steps, and absolutely no node_modules folder bloating my hard drive like a digital tumor.
The whole site is just three files and a folder of photos. If you "View Source" right now, you're seeing the whole engine. No obfuscation. I wanted something I could open in a basic text editor at 2 a.m. and actually troubleshoot, because the person most likely to break this site is me.
The Pipeline: My Comfort Zone
This is the part that actually feels like my day job. It's a three-vendor relay race where everyone stays in their lane:
- Porkbun — cheap, honest domains without the "upsell" harassment.
- GitHub — where the code lives in a private repo.
- Vercel — the glue. I connected it to GitHub in five clicks.
Now, when I push a commit to main, Vercel grabs the files and pushes them live in under sixty seconds. It's a deployment pipeline that costs less per year than a decent steak dinner. That's how an infrastructure guy builds: boring parts, loosely coupled, easily replaced.
The "Secret" Sauce (Which is Just a Good Brief)
The catch? I didn't actually write most of the code. I wrote the brief.
I spent an hour in a blank doc spelling out exactly what I wanted. I didn't just ask for a "cool site." I demanded a specific vibe: gritty, cinematic, graphic-novel energy. Deep reds, navy, and metallic silver. I set hard constraints: no "patriotic cheese," no React, no emojis.
I handed that brief to Claude and asked for three files: index.html, styles.css, and script.js. It worked on the first try. Not because the AI is magic, but because I did the engineering work upfront.
The prompt started like this:
Act as an expert frontend developer. Build a single-page portfolio for "Tony" inspired by the gritty cinematic freeze-frames of Guy Ritchie films and the cel-shaded energy of Borderlands.
The rest was just guardrails. Mobile behavior, font stacks, and forbidden tech. It was several pages long before I hit "send."
The Takeaway
The AI is a beast at execution, but it's mediocre at direction. If you don't know what "good" looks like, you're going to get confidently average garbage forever.
The 45 minutes I spent writing that prompt were more valuable than the 40 hours I didn't spend learning a framework I'll never use again. The code is just the byproduct of a clear decision. Now, if I want to change something, I just open the file and tinker. No build logs, no dependencies — just the web, the way it used to be.