I Built It… Then I Deleted It
Yesterday I was feeling pretty proud.
I had a landing page at hihorton.com, a blog at a separate subdomain, two S3 buckets, two CloudFront distributions, DNS records wired up, and 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 in one bucket, blog in another, separate distributions, separate DNS records.
At the time it made sense. It felt organized.
But the more I worked with it the more I realized I was making it more complicated than it needed to be. I kept asking myself why I was maintaining two distributions, deploying to two buckets, managing extra DNS records.
This isn’t a company with multiple teams or isolated environments. It’s just me and one domain.
So I Rebuilt It
I moved everything into one S3 bucket. The blog lives at /blog, one CloudFront distribution, one deploy script, one place to manage everything.
Then I deleted the old bucket, the old distribution, and the extra DNS record.
It felt slightly terrifying. But also cleaner.
What I Took Away
Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s the right design. I went back and asked whether the complexity I added was solving a real problem or just something I carried over from how I imagined it should look.
It wasn’t. So I simplified it.
Deleting infrastructure I built myself was a weird feeling but it taught me more about how CloudFront actually works than building it the first time did.
Why I’m Writing This Down
I don’t want this blog to only show finished things. The rebuilding and the moments where something works but could be better are just as worth documenting.