Notes on choosing boring tools

Every product under Kreets — this site, Tilebank, my dev portfolio — runs on the same unglamorous stack: Next.js, Tailwind, and a static-first approach wherever possible. None of it is exciting to talk about, and that's the point. As a one-person studio, the biggest risk to any of these projects isn't a missing feature, it's me spending a weekend debugging infrastructure instead of shipping something a customer or reader actually benefits from.

I split things by subdomain — kreets.com as the hub, a dev.kreets.com for engineering work, shop.kreets.com for Tilebank — instead of jamming everything into one monolithic app. Each one can be deployed, redesigned, or rebuilt independently without touching the others. When Tilebank needs a new product page template, that change has zero chance of breaking the portfolio site. That isolation is worth more to me than the convenience of a single shared codebase, especially at this scale.

I also try to default to whatever requires the least ongoing maintenance. Static pages over server-rendered ones where content doesn't change per request. A mailto link over a contact form with its own backend and spam filtering. A plain data file over a database when the data is a handful of blog posts. Every one of these choices trades a bit of flexibility for a lot less to maintain, monitor, or eventually migrate.

The tradeoff is real — boring tools mean some things take longer to build than they would with a heavier framework or a no-code platform. But the failure mode of over-engineering a small project is worse: you end up maintaining infrastructure instead of the product it was supposed to support. For Kreets, where each project is small enough for one person to reason about end to end, that tradeoff isn't close.

This isn't a universal recommendation — a team with dedicated infrastructure engineers can afford complexity that a solo studio can't. But if you're building something small and want it to still be maintainable a year from now with the same amount of attention you can give it today, it's worth asking whether the interesting technology you're reaching for is actually solving a problem you have, or just one you find fun to solve.