I Built It… Then I Deleted It

Yesterday I was feeling pretty proud.

I had:

  • A landing page at hihorton.com
  • A blog at blog.hihorton.com
  • Two S3 buckets
  • Two CloudFront distributions
  • DNS records wired up
  • Deploy scripts working

It felt official.

Then today… I deleted half of it.

What Happened?

When I first built this, I separated everything:

  • Landing page → one bucket
  • Blog → different bucket
  • Separate CloudFront distributions
  • Separate DNS records

At the time, it made sense to me.

It felt organized.

But the more I worked with it, the more I realized something:

I was making it more complicated than it needed to be.

The Realization

This isn’t a company website.

It’s just me.

I don’t have multiple teams. I don’t need isolated environments. I don’t need subdomain separation.

I just need:

hihorton.com

That’s it.

So I started asking myself:

Why am I maintaining two distributions? Why am I deploying to two buckets? Why am I managing extra DNS records?

Answer: I didn’t need to.

So I Rebuilt It

I moved everything into one S3 bucket:

  • hihorton.com
  • Blog lives at /blog
  • One CloudFront distribution
  • One deploy script
  • One origin
  • One place to manage everything

Then I deleted:

  • The old blog bucket
  • The old CloudFront distribution
  • The extra DNS record

It felt slightly terrifying. But also… cleaner.

What I Learned

I’m still new to all of this.

But here’s what this taught me:

  • Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s the best design.
  • Simpler is usually better.
  • Deleting infrastructure is part of learning.
  • I understand CloudFront way better now than I did yesterday.

Most importantly:

It’s okay to rebuild things.

Why I’m Documenting This

I don’t want this blog to just show finished projects.

I want it to show the process.

The confusion. The rebuilding. The moments where something works… but could be better.