The Quiet Joy of Knowing How Things Work

I moved away from WordPress because I wanted more design flexibility, and because I was honestly tired of integrating a bunch of plugins just to add or improve the smallest things. Over the years, I also found myself stuck with Elementor Pro, paying thousands without seeing any real return on investment.

What made it worse was that even after paying for all that convenience, I still had to learn and use CSS and JavaScript whenever I wanted something custom—special effects, subtle animations, or interactions that weren’t available out of the box. Elementor is a great plugin and clearly a market leader, but like any tool, it has its limitations. Eventually, those limitations started feeling more frustrating than helpful.

So I decided it was time to take control.

I wanted to actually understand what I was building, instead of layering abstractions on top of abstractions. Making that decision has helped me more than I expected. It changed how I think about websites, structure, and what it means to build something that can grow over time.

I’m now learning Next.js and using it to build my personal website and blog. Right now, it’s very simple—but I can already see the potential. I can see how this setup gives me freedom instead of locking me into a system.

There are still things that frustrate me, especially the long cold starts and the first compile when everything feels like it’s taking forever. But despite that, I feel excited. More importantly, I feel confident. I understand the fundamentals, I can reason about the architecture, and I have a clearer sense of what I’m building and why.

That alone makes the process feel worth it.