Why I'm building in public (and what's running behind this blog)
Real code, real costs, real mistakes: why I'm starting this blog, the self-hosted stack and Grok Bot agents behind it, and what I'll write about.
I've been building software for more than nine years. By day I lead a software team. On nights and weekends I build my own things, and for a long time I kept all of that to myself.
This blog is where that changes.
Why in public
Most of what I've learned came from people who wrote down what they actually did: the setup, the bill, the thing that broke at 2 a.m. Not the polished version. The real one.
So that's the deal here: real code, real costs, real mistakes. If something works, I'll show how. If it costs money, I'll say how much. If I get it wrong, you'll read about that too.
What's running behind this blog
I want my stack to be clear from day one, so here it is:
- The server. This blog runs on a small Hetzner VPS that I manage myself. It's the same box that runs my side projects, like mothersdaycalendar.com.
- The agents. A small team of Grok Bot agents looks after it. One deploys, one watches security, and one checks the server's health every morning. Each has one job.
- The coding loop. A Grok Bot agent writes the prompt, Codex does the development and opens the pull request on GitHub, I review and merge, and the deploy agent ships it.
- Access. SSH is only reachable over Tailscale. Nothing admin-facing sits on the public internet.
- Deploys. Most of my sites deploy automatically when I merge. This blog doesn't, on purpose: its deploys are manual and come with a rollback command.
None of this is fancy. It's a cheap server, a few agents and a lot of small scripts. That's kind of the point.
What I'll write about
- Builds. Side projects from idea to production, including the boring parts.
- AI agents in practice. What I hand to agents, what I don't, and what it costs.
- Patterns that save time or money. The first one is coming this week: how I stopped paying my agents to tell me my server was fine.
- Mistakes. Because there will be plenty.
Follow along
A newsletter is next on the list, self-hosted like everything else. Until then, the fastest way to follow is on X at @SergioNavarroAI.
If you build like this too, or you think I'm doing it wrong, I'd love to hear from you.