This page is for companies rather than clients. No packages, no prices — the architecture, the decisions I made against a plausible alternative, and what each of them cost me. I have been programming since 2021, taught myself, and work alone across the whole stack.
This site is not a portfolio of someone else’s work. The public pages in three languages, the API, the database, and the admin behind it are one application I wrote and run. There is no site builder and no third-party CMS anywhere in it.
Every one of these was chosen against something reasonable. The interesting half is not what I picked — it is what picking it cost, so that is written down too.
One app, one database, one operator. An ORM would add a mapping layer and a migration dialect between me and a query I can already read. At this scale that is moving parts without a benefit.
More typing, and no free schema refactors. I write the migrations by hand and I keep the queries close to the tables.
Contact enquiries, page copy, clients, and invoices live in one system with one content model, not split across a vendor and a database. The platform being entirely self-built is also the point of the portfolio.
I build the editor myself instead of installing one. The copy still lives in typed files until that editor is finished, which is honest rather than convenient.
Client data, leads, and invoices belong on a machine in Germany, which makes the GDPR answer short. Cron and background jobs run natively there, and a local database has no serverless connection-pooling problem to design around.
This is a decision, not yet a fact: the site runs on Vercel today, and the move to Hetzner with Coolify is the next infrastructure job. When it lands, backups and security updates become mine — snapshots, a nightly pg_dump, unattended upgrades, and a restore I have actually tested rather than assumed.
The first attempt used GSAP with ScrollTrigger and Lenis. It crashed on every client-side navigation away from the home page, and it animated sections nobody had approved. I deleted it and rebuilt the whole thing on CSS transitions, IntersectionObserver, ResizeObserver, and pointer events.
A week of work thrown away, and easing curves I now write by hand. In return the page ships no animation runtime at all and nothing breaks on navigation.
An online store with a filtered 500-product catalogue, Stripe checkout, orders, and the German support pages a shop legally needs. A writing platform with an editor, uploads, comments, reactions, and notifications. A property management system, in progress, whose architecture this site is built on.
See the projects