davblu.dev

A personal site usually asks the reader to take it on trust: years of experience, skills in a list, adjectives in place of evidence. I wanted one where every figure can be traced to a repository, a release or a live page, that I can keep current without touching code, and that runs on the VPS I already operate.

A Next.js App Router site with Payload CMS 3 embedded in the same app and SQLite on one volume, shipped as a single container to my VPS by GitLab CI, Docker Compose and a shared Traefik behind Cloudflare. Everything a reader sees (Case Studies, Journey, Skills, Hero, Contacts) is edited in the Payload admin with drafts and live preview. A publish expires the site cache, so the change shows on the next request, and the resume PDF at /resume.pdf is rendered from the same content.

Each Case Study and Position plays as a Scene with its own palette, backdrop and emblem, on the Showcase at /work, the Journey and a Skill Tree that grows with the scroll. A REST API with an API key lets each of my project repositories publish its own Case Study.

The hard parts were the evidence rules and the SQLite path. A Proof is shown only when it has a value worth showing: an absent, zero or failing one is hidden, never rendered as "0" or "down". The Activity Proof counts my commits across private repositories on my own GitLab through its API and publishes only the number. Payload's SQLite adapter runs on drizzle-kit, which dropped foreign key actions and failed some table rebuilds, so I patched it, commit every generated migration, and let the server apply pending migrations itself at start.

Live at davblu.dev, deployed on every push to main after a pipeline runs lint, typecheck and tests. The same content produces the pages, Open Graph images, JSON-LD, the sitemap and the resume PDF.

From an empty repository to production in six days and 199 commits, from 26 September to 1 October 2026, tracked as Issues in DavBlu Tasks, with its decisions recorded as ADRs.