Postgres is not as scary as I thought

The first time I tried to learn SQL I bounced hard. The tutorials all used toy databases, the syntax felt clunky, and I did not understand why I would not just use a document store.

This weekend I spun up a free Neon database, pointed a Next.js app at it, and wrote maybe fifteen queries. It was fine. More than fine. It was actually enjoyable once I stopped fighting it.

What helped was working on a real problem. I had posts, categories, tags, and authors. The relationships were obvious. The queries were obvious. I stopped worrying about SQL and started thinking about what I actually wanted to pull out.

The next step is Drizzle, then Payload. But even raw SQL is fine. Postgres is a tool, not a monster.