Block by Block
Building Something
It's been a while since I've written anything here. I'll save the personal "life updates" for another post, because I want to focus this one on a project I've been working on over the past few weeks. As you may know, I'm a huge football (soccer) fan. I'm a true football nerd - I love reading about the history of the game, analyzing tactics, discussing the latest matches with friends and coworkers, playing it myself on the weekends, and following my local club. So I decided to combine my passion for football with my technical skills and build a full-stack web application.
The main idea is a prediction app. In sports, making long-term predictions is notoriously difficult, but it's always fun to jot down your thoughts at the start of a season and see how accurate (or hilariously off-base) you were. With this app, users can create an account and submit their predictions for the upcoming Premier League season - things like the top 6 teams, relegation candidates, and more. There are plenty of other features in the works as well.
The Stack
As for the technical stack, I'm using Next.js, It's my bread and butter and the one I'm most comfortable and productive with. For styling, I'm relying on the trusty Tailwind CSS. For the database, I've chosen Supabase - I used it at my previous job and found it easy to set up and use, with a good overall developer experience. And for authentication, I'm going with Clerk. I researched a lot of different auth libraries like NextAuth, Supabase Auth, and Lucia, and Clerk seemed the simplest to implement, which was important since I want to get this app launched before the Champions League starts.
TL;DR:
Next.js
Tailwind.CSS
Clerk
Supabase
Nothing too groundbreaking, just the tools I'm most familiar and comfortable with to get this application up and running quickly.
Hosting
As for hosting, I haven't decided on a final solution yet. For now, it's deployed on Vercel, which is great for testing and prototyping. But I'm considering other options as well. I've been curious about Coolify, which seems like an interesting alternative to the traditional cloud hosting providers like AWS. I'll need to do some more research on Coolify, but the idea of spinning up my own server and hosting it there seems appealing.
Coming Soon
I'm really excited to get this app launched soon and start gathering user predictions for the upcoming Premier League season. Stay tuned for more updates!