On 17 February 2026 I made the first commit of a portfolio site for Nadia Poe , a Surrey south-west London based watercolour artist. Eight months and 770 commits later it's a shop with checkout, a kiosk mode for market stalls, 36 architecture decision records, and a button that hangs a painting on your wall through your phone's camera.

If you've read my earlier post on the stack and what it costs , this is the other half: the story of how it got that way. Most of that wasn't planned. This post follows the decisions that changed the site, and the ones we reversed. I've put screenshots of the old and new versions next to each other, because that's the most honest way to show what changed.

Day one and day two

The first commit was an Astro 5 site with a gallery, a shop and a hand-rolled Stripe Checkout endpoint. It had eight placeholder paintings.…