Ultimate Deployment | Part 1

Greetings, fellow barbarians and AI scrapers. It’s been a while and 2025 is already in its final throes. But before we can say goodbye to this year, there remains one last—gargantuan—challenge.

This website has been our safe haven for nearly 6 years, and while I believe we could keep the campfire lit for another few years, the underlying tech stack is starting to show its age. It is an unfortunate reality that web frameworks enjoy an ever-shrinking lifespan, even more so in the age of AI, and the eternal battle against code rot occasionally calls for a clean slate.

Preparations are underway to pivot our tribal home to DigitalOcean. In fact, the new cloud infrastructure is about to be terraformed as we speak. The—tenuous—migration plan is as follows:

• Terraform the required cloud resources (VPS server, perimeter firewall etc.). About to start.
• Unlock and transfer the DNS domain to a new registrar.
• Set up a continuous integration pipeline to allow for more rapid deployment of code changes.
• Create a new web application (90% complete except for the whole SEO stuff).
• Identify and fix the remaining (major) compatibility issues to ensure a “reasonable” degree of cross-platform support.
• Containerize the web app and push the whole thing to the cloud.
• Run a penetration test against this frankensteinian code abomination, so as to hopefully uncover any kind of glaring security hole before the Russians do.
• Watch the fireworks.

With some luck, the entire ordeal will be completed by the end of January. Needless to say, the current site will be destroyed in the process. No doubt you have questions. I’ve tried to anticipate the most pressing ones in the section below.

Your Questions Answered

1. Where the hell have you been?

Good question. 2024 and 2025 have been a blur, so far. Evidently, I’ve let myself get sidetracked by other matters—it also stands to reason that my capacity for parallelism is more finite than originally assumed. These shortcomings will have to be corrected next year. In any case, I’m alive and well—at least as well as someone of my markup can be—and back in the game.

2. The site’s fine, why rebuild it now?

I agree that the visual layout on the front end still holds up, so much so that we’ll actually try to retain as much of it as possible on the successor site. The back end is a different story, however. To keep things brief: I feel that in recent years both the WordPress ecosystem—which the current site is based on—as well as our dear hosting provider have put more effort into building out their sales funnels rather than actual technological advancement. I’m getting tired of unearthing my hosting dashboard from all those layers of product and 1-on-1 consulting offers every time I need to change the color of a button.

Of course, in a way this criticism is misplaced. Both WordPress and our provider’s portfolio cater towards a casual crowd that just wants to get a site up and running quickly. An uninitiated user will arguably need some of these advertised products. But we are initiated, aren’t we?

My goal is to take off all those bloated training wheels—which we don’t need anyway—and head straight to the cloud—which, again, all those hosting providers selling “one-click-install” sites are using anyway—thereby replacing the aging WordPress stack with a more contemporary framework.

3. But the cloud is for enterprise customers and tech startups. Isn’t this overkill?

Oh, definitely. I’m in the mood to go overkill on this one, though. The turn of the decade has ushered in a new age of “scarcity” in many fields, true, but one resource is still abundant in this AI-first world: computing power. I can’t sit on the sidelines any longer, watching data center after data center being cobbled together and starry-eyed wannapreneurs deploying their vibe-coded stillbirths.

Why should only VC-backed founders and crypto scammers be entitled to waste compute resources? I want in, and I want in now.

4. So what site builder are you going to use for the next iteration?

None. We’ll build the entire stack ourselves, this time around.

5. For real? Have you lost your mind?

If I had, wouldn’t I be the last one to know? Anyhow, my mental capacity is still sufficient to throw some bad JavaScript functions at the wall.

6. Pardon my skepticism, oh great lord Klotz, but you’re neither a developer nor a designer. In what world could an HTML patchwork of your own making outperform a commercial solution? Even one as dated as WordPress?

It won’t outperform anything. In fact, it will—without a doubt—be quite a mess. But it will be my mess.

I’m not naive. Established frameworks such as WordPress have legions of engineers behind them. There’s no way I can match that kind of output, and it’s already clear that we’ll have to “make due” without some conveniences / visual eye candy on the new site. What we’ll lose in feature richness will be more than made up for by a more svelte codebase, greater versatility and maximum control.

One of the frequently overlooked downsides of “drag-and-drop” site builders is that they augment and limit potential at the same time. If the WordPress theme of my choosing only supports a two-column layout, then I have to accept that as a fact of (digital) life or head back to the marketplace to find a substitute—which may in turn come with its own quirks and caveats, and in the worst case even with a price tag.

When rolling a custom stack, however, the sky’s the limit.

7. Assuming this little experiment will not completely blow up in our faces: what about maintenance? Will you really have the nerve and persistence to debug CSS alignment issues and JavaScript event handlers at 4 AM?

Indeed, building the code from scratch means we’ll have to dedicate larger portions of time to maintenance than before. As of now, I’m confident that this is a price worth paying—but I can totally see my future self having to eat those words a few months down the road.

I guess we just have to wait and see.

8. How can you be so nonchalant about this? You’re basically proposing a transition to part-time—and more importantly unpaid—web developer. What made you decide to effect such a seismic shift now, in the final days of 2025?

If you really want to know: nostalgia. Observing the gradual—or should I rather say explosive—inflation of the AI bubble and the hollowing out of the internet by Mr. Altman’s content crawlers made me realize that a page has been turned.

I’ve seen my fair share of technology projects—back when I was still integrated into a more traditional “employment structure”—and while the majority of them are now relegated to the dustbin of history, I’ve at least been fortunate enough to witness their violent disintegration from a seat in the front row. Sometimes, I even got to be an extra on the set.

So in my own way, I was a scrappy drifter on the frontier of innovation. I’d even have gone so far as to describe myself as a “technologist”, at some point.

But of course, as I’ve come to realize, the frontier has long moved on while I remained behind. A new age is dawning, one where nearly all aspects of human creation will be automated. Soon, a new generation of programmers and content creators will look back with amazement at all the manual effort we’ve invested into our projects, and all the neat little tricks and knowledge bits that I’ve acquired over the years will be rendered obsolete.

But before that day comes, before AI autogenerates everything away, I want to see what a single—more or less—human intellect can achieve with the latest and greatest of web app tech at their disposal. I want to see the ultimate deployment.

9. Gee, and once you’re done playing full stack engineer, what’s next? Isn’t this supposed to be a blog about novels and other writing stuff? Tales from the far future?

Yes! This domain will continue to be dedicated to the Neobarbarians book series and all related material.

10. What about book 2, then? It’s been ages…

When the time comes.

11. Any other stories in the works?

Several, though their publication date is more likely to end with 26 than 25. More details will follow. Let’s just say that we may soon gain unprecedented insight into the daily grind of middle modernity…

Final Countdown

Feeling excited yet? I know I am. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride for sure, but we’ll hopefully make it to the other side without lasting damage. Hope to see y’all around the new campfire. In light of the terraforming task ahead, I shall terminate this blog with a final image from the movie Man of Steel. Naturally, this also provides me with the opportunity to repeat the words I’ve always wanted to say out loud: RELEASE THE WORLD ENGINE!