Vercel Is a Godsend

I'm Not a Front-End Guy

Technically, I am not a front-end guy. This blog isn't even front-end work. The concept is plain dumb and simple that I could barely categorize this as front-end work. It's a layout that renders markdown. That's it.

But I wasn't always this far removed from the front-end. Back in my early days at Cafe24 (Simplex Internet), I was building UIs in raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No frameworks. The Korean team didn't trust external dependencies — everything from the PHP framework down was in-house. A UX designer would hand me a mockup, and I'd translate it to pixel-perfect HTML/CSS. CSS was compiling in my head as I wrote it. My college thesis was a full web app in pure HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP. I could do this stuff.

Then the world moved. Angular happened. React happened. Vue happened. Component-based architecture, virtual DOM, state management, hooks, server components — an entire paradigm shift that I watched from the sidelines while I was deep in backend work. I never pursued front-end, and the gap grew wider every year. The fundamentals are still there, but the ecosystem? I'm a boomer.

So when I say Vercel is a godsend, I mean it in the most literal sense possible: it is a gift that lets a front-end boomer like me ship a modern website. I understand how Vercel deploys and serves things — backend is my home turf. But the React side? The components, the hooks, the whole front-end paradigm? That's where AI picks up my slack.

And for disclosure, I mentioned words like components, virtual dom, and hooks. I don't know these things (yet). AI aids me to write this blogpost so that I'm writing something factual, because I do not want to add junk information to the internet.

at least i'm honest

What Vercel Actually Does for People Like Me

Vercel takes the thing I dread most — deploying a front-end application — and reduces it to pushing code to a git repository. That's it. Push to main, and your site is live. Push to a branch, and you get a preview deployment. SSL is automatic. CDN is automatic. Build optimization is automatic. I don't have to think about any of it.

For someone who has spent years wrangling Kubernetes clusters, writing Terraform configs, and debugging ECS task definitions, this feels almost unfair. Where's the suffering? Where's the YAML? Where's the part where I SSH into a server at 2 AM because nginx decided to stop serving static files?

There isn't one. It just works.

Free Tier That Actually Makes Sense

Here's the thing about Vercel's free tier — it's genuinely useful. This blog you're reading right now? Hosted on Vercel's free plan. Zero cost. For a low-traffic personal site or portfolio, you don't need anything more. You get:

• Unlimited deployments
• Preview deployments for every branch
• Automatic HTTPS
• Edge network distribution
• Serverless functions

For a personal blog or resume site, this is more than enough. I'm not running a SaaS here. I'm serving markdown rendered into HTML. The free tier handles this without breaking a sweat.

The Front-End Problem

Now, here's where I have to be honest about something. Vercel solves the deployment problem beautifully. But it doesn't solve my problem, which is that modern front-end development requires

Give me a Figma mockup and I'll translate it to HTML/CSS all day. That part is easy. But UX design — deciding what should go where, how it should feel, what the user flow should be — that's a different muscle. Some teams have a dedicated designer for that, and in those teams I'd be fine. But on a tight budget where the front-end engineer is the UX designer? That's where I struggle. This very personal blog? The architectural implementation came from AI, not from me.

I can wire up a React component, fetch data from an API, render a list. The implementation isn't the problem. React isn't my strongest suit, but it's learnable. The gap is that I stopped keeping up with the framework ecosystem years ago, and now there's a decade of conventions and patterns I never internalized.

But we have AI now. And if the job requires it, I'm up to the task.

Maybe It's Time

But here's the thing — I'm starting to think avoidance isn't a strategy anymore. The industry has shifted. Full-stack isn't just a buzzword on job descriptions; it's the actual expectation. Clients don't care that your smart contract architecture is elegant if the dashboard that displays their portfolio looks like it was designed in 2008.

And honestly? The tools have gotten better. The backend side of Next.js — server-side rendering, API routes, how Vercel deploys and serves it all — that part I get. That's my territory. What I don't get is the front-end half: components, hooks, state management, the whole React paradigm. It's an entirely different mental model from what I grew up with, and I never sat down to learn it properly.

But AI fills that gap. I describe what I want, AI writes the component, and I can read enough React to verify it does what I expect. Between Vercel handling deployment and AI handling the front-end code I can't write from memory, a backend boomer like me can ship a modern website.

Is that ideal? Probably not. But it works, and it's free, and I'm shipping. Architectural wise, my blog is plain dumb and simple: A layout that renders markdown content. So all these content are HTML free. It's purely markdown, and the AI generated code in react (next.js) just renders everything I wrote from markdown to HTML.

Why Not WordPress?

I could have built this blog in WordPress or Drupal. I've worked with PHP for years — Laravel, custom frameworks, the whole thing. But here's why I didn't: the moment you deploy a WordPress site, you inherit every vulnerability in PHP, every plugin exploit, every SQL injection vector in whatever theme you installed. You need to keep WordPress updated, keep plugins patched, manage a database, configure a web server, set up SSL, monitor for intrusions. It's a full-time ops job for a blog.

With a static Next.js site on Vercel? There's no database to breach. No PHP runtime to exploit. No admin panel to brute-force. No server to SSH into at 2 AM. The entire site is pre-rendered HTML served from a CDN. The attack surface is practically zero.

DevOps wise, this is NoOps. Vercel handles the build, the CDN, the SSL, the scaling — all of it. I push markdown to git, and a blog post appears on the internet. That's the entire deployment pipeline. No nginx configs. No Docker containers. No Kubernetes manifests. For a personal blog, this is the correct amount of infrastructure: none.

I spent years managing Kubernetes clusters and writing Terraform configs for production systems. I know what ops looks like, and I know what it costs. For a blog that serves markdown? The answer is: don't do ops. Let Vercel do it. It's free, and they're better at it than I am. Less is more.

The Whole Point

And that's really it. This blog has no moving parts. No database. No authentication. No dynamic content. It's a layout that renders markdown into HTML, deployed for free on Vercel. When I want to write a post, I open a .mdx file, write in plain markdown, push to git, and it's live. The entire workflow fits in my terminal — which, as a backend engineer, is exactly where I want to be.

I didn't need to learn React properly to build this. I didn't need to understand the component lifecycle or state management or whatever the front-end world is arguing about this week. AI wrote the rendering code, I wrote the content, and Vercel made sure it shows up on the internet.

For a personal blog, this is the endgame. There's nothing left to optimize. Nothing left to configure. Just markdown files and git push. And that, genuinely, is a godsend.