Building in Public

This hub is the build log of Shipworthy itself. The site is a developer blog with a reading-rewards system, a personalised daily digest and a newsletter, built and run by one engineer on serverless AWS. The posts here explain the decisions behind it as they are made: the stack, the infrastructure, the costs, the traffic, the features and the mistakes.

It is for developers building something of their own, whether that is a side project, a content site or a small product, who want to see how the work actually goes rather than a polished launch story. If you are weighing a similar stack, wondering what a serverless site costs to run, or curious how a blog can reward readers without turning into a points farm, the details are here.

The approach is to share real numbers and real configs, including the parts that went wrong. When a number is not known yet, such as a monthly bill before a full month has passed, the post says so instead of guessing. Configs are shown with the versions they were written against, because the tools move fast and a working setup today can break on the next release. Earlier posts may be revised as decisions change, with the update noted. Nothing in this hub is sponsored, and the tools it mentions are the ones the site actually runs on.

Where to start: the first build log, on why this is a blog with XP at all, explains the idea behind the site and the anti-abuse rules that keep the rewards honest. Then read how Shipworthy runs Next.js 16 on AWS with SST, which covers the whole infrastructure in one config file and the deploy gotchas that cost the most time. Later entries will follow the newsletter, the rewards system and the real numbers as they arrive.