Beri.Media

Start of a love story.

This is blog-article of CW36. The start of blogging for me on this website.

Title image for blog article "Start of a love story" KW37 with the words written on it: Supabase, Hetzner, subdomains, motion.dev, dns, react, css basics, html basics, sql basics, contact forms, coolify, c#, javascript basics, lego mindstorms, self-hosting, theoretical cs,

Felix Dressler

September 26, 2025

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Hi! I’m Felix. And this is my love story with software.

But first a little more about me: Coding wasn’t on my map for a long time. Yes, I was into Lego mindstorms as a kid and if I now think about it, maybe coding wasn’t that of a foreign topic for me. At least I was part of the robotics team for 2 years. But I was never the guy that geek out completely and ran the entire School IT on his behalf. That changed about 2 years ago.

Why do you write this blog?

  1. As a now tech guy I want to improve in a completely different field - story telling.
  2. I want to put myself out there. Don’t be shy and see what comes from that.
  3. I maybe want to create reach.
  4. I talk way too much about software with my friends and girlfriend. So I’ll let it all out here.

Anyways…

In my age (I’m 27) some learn to play the guitar others sign up for their first marathons or aim for even higher sporty goals. I learned how to code.

Starting with basic html for a whack photography portfolio until I learned that there is JavaScript to discard it again for frameworks and the next tech stack until I reached a point where I could build a solid front end. To then learn how to self-host and starting on little more complex backends. Step by step ticking further boxes of web development like creating a contact form or implementing a CMS. But the details of my journey may I save for another time.

What’s important, that I always learned project based until I took Harvards CS50 course. Time intensive but which I can highly recommend. This was a new experience learning things from the ground up and in a more theoretical fashion. Nevertheless, part of the course is a final project which leads me to the present.

I will now attempt to complete this project in the remaining 4 months of this year to receive the advertised certificate and that’s about what this blog will be until the end of the year. I already have an idea that ticks the boxes of a cool software product:

✅ build something you would use

✅ solve a niche problem

✅ build something your friends find cool as well

What will you build?

The last point I made up myself, but this is the first time that’s actually true for something I build. Now your asking: “what will our you build?” Which I will not tell you straight away, but I will also not hide it on purpose, so stick around and you will find out rather quick.

How will you build it?

I will have to define the features for my MVP (minimal viable product), but I’ll write this down later. Plans are always big, but 4 months and a full time employment don’t leave enough room for perfection. Additionally you get told enough times to build fast, test on real users and fix then.

For what I have in my head I will need a backend. And in the beginning this has to do two things:

  1. Storing users & enable authentication
  2. Store the users data

I shortly considered just using a postgresql database Self-hosted via coolify on hetzner. But thinking anbout authentication remembered me that I then would have to build all those functionality by myself. And I am honestly a little scared of security issues which I might miss as a newbie when self hosting.

So the other options are backend services like firebase, supabase or pocketbase. And I made the decision to go with supabase. It phase more functionality than pocketbase, but better migration possibilities than firebase, which reduces vendor lock-in risks.

On frontend side I have no choice and will stick to next.js since I only “speak” react.

Find a Project Name

Pocketbase asks me for a project name. ChatGPT proposed: Smartpick, ClearChoice, SmartChoice, BetterDecide, BetterChoices, BuyWise, CleverBuy, SmartBuy, BetterBuy.

And since buysmarter.online is still available I’ll go for BuySmarter. Nice side effect: .online domains are quite cheap for the First year.

Here we are. Lets get this project started!

Felix ✌🏽

Follow the project on GitHub. Comment there if you have tips for me. The plan is to make it self-hostable so I’ll keep it open source.

This blog is not AI polished. Not even corrected with ChatGPT. Raw from my techie brain trying to be artsy.