A Bit of Background
My idea was pretty simple at first: I wanted to create a website that I could develop in my free time (I work as a Frontend Developer).
My partner (from now on I’ll call him Modbanger) was coming from a different angle. He became the curator and author of part of the content on our site, and also worked on the concept and design. Writing articles and building content has always been his thing, especially when it comes to mods for old games. That’s why this project became the perfect intersection of our interests.
I won’t dive too deep into this story here — this post is mostly about the technical side.
For those interested, Modbanger wrote more about it -> Read the backstory
A short preview of several pages
Where We Started: MVP
Once we settled on the idea, it was obvious: if we tried to build everything at once, the project would turn into endless development. So we focused on the minimum viable product — the features without which the platform simply wouldn’t make sense.
The first things we brought to life were:
File catalog — mods, add-ons, fan games, and engines.
Basic search and filtering — still a bit buggy, but already usable.
Multilingual support — content available in six languages.
Image and screenshot gallery.
Articles and blogs — for now limited to admins, but we’re working on user profiles to expand this feature in the future.
That became the very first version of the website — live just a little over a month ago.
Choosing the Tech Stack
I chose this stack mainly because I already had experience with MERN, but over time I almost completely moved to Next.js instead of plain React for the frontend. That was the main reason to use Next.js in this project.
Of course, I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way — I think I’ve collected nearly all the “classic” ones you often see discussed in GitHub issues or on Reddit 🙂.
Next.js — for the frontend and SSR/SEO.
Express.js + MongoDB — for the backend. Why MongoDB? Simple: it’s a database I already knew well and felt comfortable with.
AWS S3 — for file storage (why we eventually abandoned it is a story for another time 😅).
But as development went on, bugs and limitations started to show up. It became clear that Express.js didn’t provide the structure we needed for a scalable project. That’s when we decided to move to Nest.js — a stricter and more modular framework, which made maintaining and growing the backend much easier.
For now, I’ll stop here, otherwise this post will get way too long 🙂 Today, the project already uses many more technologies: choosing a WYSIWYG editor, integrating OpenAI API and DeepL API, building a commenting system, and much more. Each of these tasks pushed us to answer the same question: “How do we implement this in a way that will scale?”
Wrapping Up
This post is just the first part of the story of how we started building Modstalgia. First came the idea, then the MVP, then the tech stack… and next came mistakes, experiments, and unexpected solutions — which I’ll share in future posts.
I’m sure every developer has faced that same moment of choosing between a quick MVP and building architecture for the long run.
👉 How do you approach this? Do you go with “fast and working” first, or do you aim to build scalability from the start?
Would love to hear your stories in the comments 👇
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