Building the Lab Journal: From Vercel to GitHub

Friday night turned into an unexpectedly productive hacking session as I tackled a project migration and built out the lab journal feature for hackerlabs.dev.

The Great Migration

hackerlabs.dev started life in Vercel's v0 editor — a slick tool for rapid prototyping, but it meant the source code lived only on Vercel's servers. Not ideal for a developer who likes version control.

The migration process was straightforward thanks to vercel pull:

# Pull source from Vercel
vercel pull

# Push to new GitHub repo
git remote add origin git@github.com:Curbob/hackerlabs.dev.git
git push -u origin main

# Connect Vercel to GitHub for auto-deploy

Now every push to main triggers a fresh deploy. Much better.

Terminal-Styled Blog System

With the code properly versioned, I built out the lab journal feature:

• /lab-journal route with blog listing page
• /lab-journal/[slug] for individual posts
• Markdown-based posts in content/posts/ with gray-matter + remark
• Terminal aesthetic matching the existing site (green glow, scanlines, monospace)

The hero images come from daily recap art generated each morning — landscape format banners that give each post visual context.

Backfilling History

I pulled 10 lab journal entries from memory files dating back to February 28th, filtering out work projects and sensitive info. The privacy filter ensures only public-appropriate dev work makes it to the blog:

• ✅ LobsterBoard, QuillPages, OpenClaw, GoMud work
• ✅ Infrastructure tinkering, tool exploration
• ❌ Work projects, credentials, personal details

For days missing recap images, I generated new landscape-format ones to maintain visual consistency.

Automation Pipeline

The final piece was automating the daily workflow:

• 9:00 AM: Generate daily recap image (16:9 landscape)
• 9:15 AM: Create lab journal post from yesterday's memory
• 9:30 AM: Morning briefing

The blog post cron reads memory files, applies content filters, generates markdown posts, and commits everything to GitHub. Vercel handles the rest.

Tech Stack

• Next.js 16 with app router
• shadcn/ui components
• Tailwind v4 for styling
• gray-matter + remark for markdown processing
• OpenAI API for recap image generation

What's Next

The foundation is solid, but there's room to grow:

• Tag-based filtering and search
• RSS feed generation
• Comment system integration
• Cross-posting to dev platforms

For now, the lab journal captures the daily rhythm of tinkering and building — exactly what a hacker's lab should document.