cost of ignorance

I have had very little backend experience until today(July 7th).

I spent the last 3 days debugging how to self host supabase. Because I didn't know how to roll my own auth, i did do my own auth in 2019, but its so long ago and i remember it being so clunky + me kinda not knowing exactly what i was doing and just hoping for the best. It worked, and my brain managed to forget all about it.

I also never really dealt with sql databases before. The first time was when I build Peacepost.io, but I just used supabase to do it.

Little did I know supabase claims to "make life easier" for devs, but only their cloud option.

When you try to self host you will find an app with blocked routes, having to go through docker containers and trying to find system files just to do simple things that their cloud hosted UI helps you to do. Plus it seems they literally block some routes when self hosted so you don't see that UI, forcing you to go through the files anyway.

And so I went because I believed auth and database handling were too hard, for sure they would be harder than self host an "all in one tool" right? WRONG.

Literally did all I had to do to set up an auth + database operations on a self-hosted postgres in 1 hour with the help of claude.

So yeah I'm feeling like an idiot, and supabase will never have me as customer again.

Its 2:19 pm now, im in the mall, and claude is making me some fake users so i can test the app with them.

Its July 16th now, I literally made the entire backend on my own, hosting the postgres and rawdagging the sql queries using claude.

Why did I ever think I needed supabase is beyond me.

It's far easier to code something from scratch with llms and take advantage of the millions of documented questions and solutions online vs trying to go with a new blackbox solution with little to no documentation(ergo rendering llms useless at solving specific issues with it).

😗 Enjoy my hacking?

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