How this site is built

title: How this site is built date: 2026-05-20 summary: Next.js 15, MDX, Tailwind v4, Turborepo — and the path to AWS. tags: [meta, architecture]

Phase 1 of this site runs on Vercel. Later phases migrate to AWS: S3 + CloudFront for origin and CDN, Lambda@Edge for dynamic features, DynamoDB for state, and AWS CDK as the source of truth for infrastructure.

Today's stack

• Next.js 15 (App Router, React Server Components)
• TypeScript, everywhere
• Tailwind CSS v4 — CSS-first config, zero JS-side config file
• @next/mdx + gray-matter for posts and the resume
• rehype-pretty-code + Shiki for build-time syntax highlighting
• Turborepo workspaces so future tools or apps slot in cleanly

What's next

• Migrate the build output to S3 with a CloudFront distribution in front
• Add Lambda@Edge for view counts (DynamoDB) and a newsletter signup (SES)
• Move all infra into AWS CDK so the entire setup lives in this repo
• Add a GitHub Actions pipeline: typecheck → lint → test → build → deploy
• Ship an AI semantic search across posts as a Lambda + LLM API endpoint

The whole point of the roadmap is to ship fast first, then re-platform once there's something real to host.