Behind the Scenes — Part 2 (Days 4–6)
The Making of Notes From a B. Tech Brain — Website Edition
(Nov 2 – Nov 4 – Nov 30)
If Part 1 was construction, Part 2 is wiring, polish, mood swings, and small miracles at 1 a.m.
Day 4 — 2nd November 2025
Day 4 began with confusion and ended with connection — literally.
When I opened my project after disappearing for weeks, my brain had reset itself. MongoDB Atlas felt unfamiliar again. Environment variables felt like riddles. Netlify’s interface felt like it had shape-shifted since the last time I touched it.
But I kept going.
I created Cluster0 on MongoDB Atlas, installed the VS Code extension, wrote little playground snippets, and for the first time ever… ran a query that wrote directly into the cloud.
Seeing “First Post from Zee” inside the Data Explorer felt unreal. Like I had just placed my flag on a tiny moon.
Then came the server setup: server.js, .env, mongoose.connect() — and the beautiful message:
“MongoDB connected successfully.”
It felt like my project finally inhaled its first breath.
But the part that drained my soul? Netlify environment variables.
No “Site Settings.” Only “Project Configuration.” Team variables locked behind a paywall. Backend not deploying automatically with frontend.
It was a mess. But it also forced a realization:
My backend needed its own home — Render.
By the end of Day 4, nothing was visually different on the site. But under the hood? The heart was beating. Quietly. But beating.
Day 5 — 4th November 2025
After the backend brain-fry, Day 5 was pure design therapy.
No APIs. No clusters. Just aesthetic justice.
The hero gradient had been bothering me for weeks. The old blue→pink felt too soft, too washed out, too “template-ish.” So I reworked it into a sharper blue→green transition — cooler, cleaner, more Zee building her own corner of the internet.
Then I played with depth. Indigo, cyan, emerald… until it finally felt like a creator’s desk at midnight: smart, electric, warm.
And honestly? Seeing that gradient live on Netlify gave me more dopamine than half the backend work.
This was the day I remembered something important:
Design isn’t decoration. Design is identity.
And for a blog that carries both my words and my world, identity matters.
Day 5 ended with no big commits, no complex logic — just a site that felt more like me than it ever had before.
Day 6 — 30th November 2025
After almost a month of radio silence, I came back to the project feeling guilty, rusty… and weirdly excited.
Day 6 was pure cleanup mode. No fancy features, just a long overdue “fix everything that annoys me” session.
Here’s what finally got done:
✔ Homepage Layout Fixes
The post cards were ridiculously wide — like “why is this a landscape canvas?” wide. I tightened the grid, fixed max-widths, added spacing. Instant professionalism.
✔ Banner Rendering Fixed
No more awkward crops. No more cut-off edges. Just clean banners sitting exactly where they should.
✔ Text Width Aligned With Banner
This single change made every article feel 10× more readable. Visual consistency matters more than people think.
✔ Mobile Navbar (finally)
The navbar was ghosting on small screens — rude. Now there’s a hamburger toggle. Smooth and stable.
✔ More Markdown Posts Added
I started converting my Volume I editions into .md files, and honestly? It felt like cataloguing memories.
Day 6 taught me something I already knew but needed to relearn:
Small UI fixes resurrect your attachment to a project.
By the end of the day, the site felt polished. Clean. Confident. And for the first time, I thought:
“Okay… this looks like a real publication now.”
A Sneak Peek into Part 3 (Days 7–9)
If Part 2 was about polish… Part 3 is where things break, rebuild, and transform completely.
Coming next:
- The day everything crashed because of categories
- The switch from Netlify to Vercel
- Fixing missing slugs, invisible banners, and runtime bugs
- The marathon uploads of all 50 editions
- The moment the website finally became a living archive
Part 3 is chaos and victory wrapped together — the final sprint before the site became the home it was always meant to be.