So I finally hit deploy on my weekend warrior project at https://aimrksm.org/ and I'm basically oscillating between pride and panic every five minutes. This IPLwin thing started as a random idea during a boring meeting and somehow turned into months of late-night coding sessions.

Tech-wise, I went a bit rogue and built everything with Next.js paired with a Laravel backend, which probably sounds weird but made sense at the time. Threw PostgreSQL into the mix because I kept hearing it was bulletproof, though honestly I'm still figuring out if I'm using it efficiently. The whole stack feels like controlled chaos.

Visually, I was chasing that "professional but approachable" sweet spot, though I suspect I might have landed somewhere in bland territory instead. Built everything with Tailwind CSS because utility classes felt less overwhelming than writing custom stylesheets from scratch. The layout works but lacks that special something that makes sites memorable.

User experience design was basically me guessing what felt logical and hoping for the best. The flow from landing page to actual functionality seemed obvious during development, but now I'm realizing users don't have the same mental map I do. Onboarding might be too abrupt or too hand-holding, honestly can't tell anymore.

Optimization rabbit holes consumed way too much time - image compression, code splitting, database query tuning, caching strategies. Running everything on AWS because it seemed professional, though the complexity is probably overkill for my current needs.

The whole user management system turned into an unexpectedly deep dive. Registration, verification, permissions, session handling - what started simple kept growing until it felt like I was reinventing authentication from scratch.

Really need some external perspective here. Does it feel like a coherent product or just a collection of features that happen to live on the same domain? Should I keep building or step back and rethink the core concept?