How this site is built

Engineers love a good colophon, so here’s mine. And honestly, telling you exactly how this thing is built is the most honest sales pitch I’ve got — so I’m going to lean into it.

The whole site is self-hosted on Kubernetes. Not because it needs to be (it really doesn’t, for the traffic), but because the point is partly to run it the way real systems run — so there’s something real to learn from when it breaks.

The stack, and why

• Content / CMSPayload, self-hosted. I looked hard at Ghost, but Ghost on Kubernetes is a fight I didn’t feel like having. Payload is just a Node app and a Postgres — exactly the kind of boring I like.
• DatabasePostgres, with pgvector doing the “have we already explained this?” search so we don’t end up with nine slightly different Kafka posts.
• EmbeddingsA self-hosted bge model. I didn’t want every search quietly phoning home to someone else’s API.
• Writing + reviewClaude generates a draft, then a second pass — grounded with web search — fact-checks it and flags anything that smells wrong. A human signs off before anything ships.
• DiagramsRendered from specs, never generated as images. An AI-drawn architecture diagram is confidently, beautifully wrong about half the time, and this is a site about being right.
• Jobspg-boss, on top of Postgres. No Redis. One less thing to run and one less thing to wake me up.
• EmailListmonk, double opt-in, relayed through a real provider so I don’t quietly torch my own domain reputation.

The part I actually care about

Here’s the fun bit. This entire site is monitored by 2AM Agent — the AI SRE I’m building. So the publication that explains the systems engineers build is itself a system, running in production, that my own agent keeps an eye on.

It’s the most honest demo I could think of. I’m not going to show you a polished slide about what the agent would do — you can just watch what it actually does, on the thing you’re reading right now. (Is it a clever growth hack the only way a solo builder can afford a real production workload to test against? Yes. Both. It’s both.)

So — if you want the agent side of all this, that’s over at 2AM Agent. And if you just want to finally understand Kafka properly, the weekly’s right here.