Next up: a small Spring Boot service, deployed the hard way

This site's deployment story is push-to-deploy on Vercel — convenient, but it hides most of the actual infrastructure work behind a dashboard. The next project is meant to expose that work instead of hiding it.

The plan

A small standalone Spring Boot API — Java is already on my resume, Spring Boot isn't yet. Scope stays intentionally small: one or two endpoints, enough to be real rather than a "Hello World."

Deployment target is deliberately not Vercel. Containerize it with Docker, push to a registry, and deploy to a real host (Fly.io, Render, or an AWS free-tier box) — closer to the provisioning work I already do at NCS, just for an application I built end-to-end myself.

Why this, why now

Terraform and VMware taught me infrastructure-as-code and virtualization from the ops side. This is the other half: building the application that gets deployed, not just the environment it runs in.

Will follow up here once there's something running.