The Real Cost of a Shortcut: Why I Fired My Deployment Hack

What Broke: The Asset Collision Trap

My objective was to deploy my new high-performance SSG blog under a single domain sub-path (/blog) alongside my existing Next.js portfolio. I aimed for simplicity: use Vercel's standard deployment rewrites to handle the routing.

It failed immediately and systemically.

When two independent Next.js applications share a hostname and path space, their core asset paths clash. The framework’s dynamic files (/next/static/...) became ambiguous, leading to broken styles and scripts.

My initial, desperate response was to implement a non-standard hack: forcing absolute URLs for all assets. This got the site running, but it introduced guaranteed technical friction. I was manually overriding a core framework behavior.

The hard truth I faced: I had traded a few hours of setup time for a lifetime of maintenance tax. I was spending my time debugging deployment artifacts instead of building value. This architecture was built to resist growth.

How I Fixed It: Prioritizing Decoupling

The architectural review led to one non-negotiable mandate: eliminate systemic friction.

I immediately terminated the custom asset hack. Trying to force two complex applications to act as one was the root cause of the fragility. Scalability is not achieved by bending frameworks; it is achieved through clean separation of concerns.

The Strategic Pivot: I committed to a cleaner, decoupled architecture. This means treating the blog and the portfolio as two independent systems that do not share deployment dependencies on the Vercel level.

Whether the final path involves implementing a Monorepo structure to manage shared code or a shift to completely independent micro-services is the secondary decision. The primary decision—the strategic cure—was to restore architectural integrity and stability, ensuring my codebase is an asset, not a liability.

The Single Principle I Learned That Day

The entire roadblock, from the initial failure to the strategic pivot, boiled down to one principle:

I only achieve true velocity by eliminating future work.

If my solution requires custom code, fragile overrides, or non-standard documentation to stay alive, I am simply pre-paying for every future failure. A stable foundation, even if it takes slightly longer to set up, is the ultimate multiplier for speed and long-term high-leverage development.

I stop debugging hacks today to prevent guaranteed production failures later.

Follow my journey as I implement the new, stable architecture and restore high-leverage development.