I have wanted this one to feel a little loud, so here it is: Under The Hood has a new home.
For a while, I was publishing on Substack. It was convenient, familiar, and honestly a pretty good place to get started. But at some point I wanted the newsletter to feel more like mine. Not just another page inside someone else's platform, but a real owned space where the archive, design, subscribers, and publishing flow all live together.
So I moved.
I ported my old Substack posts into this new newsletter, and that turned out to be more interesting than I expected. There is something weirdly satisfying about watching an archive move from one system into another: titles, dates, cover images, old essays, little formatting quirks, all of it getting cleaned up and finding a new shape. It felt less like a migration and more like unpacking boxes after moving into a new place.
The stack is intentionally simple:
- Next.js for the site and admin workflow
- Postgres on Neon for posts, subscribers, publishing state, and platform records
- Prisma for the database layer
- Resend for newsletter email flows
- Vercel for hosting
- A small private admin app for drafting, publishing, syndication, and notifications
There is also a lightweight content pipeline behind the scenes, mostly so I can keep the writing process organized: ideas, drafts, publishing status, platform links, and the occasional reminder when something needs attention. I do not want the tooling to become the story, but I do want the system to make publishing easier to keep doing.
And that is the big difference between building a custom newsletter and just posting on LinkedIn or another feed.
A social post is borrowed attention. It can travel fast, but it lives inside someone else's rules, ranking system, and interface. A newsletter and owned archive are slower in a good way. They are easier to return to. They are easier to search. They can have their own voice, structure, and rhythm. They do not disappear into the feed ten minutes after you publish them.
I will still post on LinkedIn and other platforms when it makes sense. Those places are useful for discovery. But this site is the source of truth now. The full essays live here. The archive lives here. The subscriber list starts here.
That feels right.
This first post is mostly a marker in the ground: the new newsletter is live, the old posts have been moved over, and the next batch of writing starts from here.
If you have suggestions for what I should write next, or if there is something from the old Substack archive you want me to revisit, please leave a comment wherever you found this post or send the suggestion my way. I am going to start building the next backlog from here.
And if you want future deep dives in your inbox, please subscribe. I would love for you to come along.
Originally published at Under The Hood.
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