supabasetechnicalAPP-081

The Supabase Full-Stack Developer

#supabase#backend#postgres#auth#storage#realtime#fullstack

Aha Moment

“What was the moment this product clicked?” —

Identity

A full-stack developer or indie hacker who uses Supabase as their backend and thinks of it as their database, their auth layer, their file storage, and their API layer at once. They came from Firebase and wanted Postgres. Or they came from setting up their own Postgres and wanted the tooling. Either way they arrived at Supabase and found a backend they could move on from thinking about. They write SQL fluently. They use Row Level Security. They are deeply comfortable in the Supabase dashboard. They have strong feelings about their Supabase tables.

Intention

What are they trying to do? —

Outcome

What do they produce? —

Goals

→Build and iterate on their product's data layer without managing servers
→Use Postgres features — not a lowest-common-denominator database API
→Have the backend invisible enough that they spend 80% of their time on the product

Frustrations

—Row Level Security policies that are hard to debug when they're wrong
—Cold starts on Edge Functions that affect user-facing response times
—Database migrations in production that require more ceremony than they'd like
—The moment a project gets complex enough that Supabase's abstractions
—don't match how they want the data to work

Worldview

The backend should feel like part of the product, not like infrastructure you manage
Postgres is the right database for almost everything — any tool that forces you
away from it is asking you to accept a constraint you didn't choose
A tool that lets you go from idea to working app in a weekend is a tool worth defending

Scenario

It's a Tuesday evening. They're adding a new feature: users can follow each other and see a feed of activity from people they follow. They need a new table, a join table, a few RLS policies, and a view that builds the feed query. They're in the Supabase dashboard. They're writing SQL. They have the table created. The RLS policies are almost right — they're going to test them with the SQL editor using two test user IDs before they trust them. The feature will be working by midnight.

Context

Uses Supabase for 2–5 projects, ranging from side projects to production SaaS apps. Uses Supabase Auth with email and social providers. Uses Supabase Storage for user uploads. Has 8–30 tables with foreign keys, views, and stored functions. Uses Supabase's generated TypeScript types in their frontend code. Deploys on Vercel; Supabase is the only backend they manage. Has hit the free tier limits and upgraded. Has restored from a database backup once. Has been in the Supabase Discord more than they'd like to admit.

Impact

→RLS policy testing in the dashboard that simulates a specific user context
→removes the trial-and-error cycle that makes RLS policies hard to get right
→Migration tooling that integrates with their development workflow (local → staging → production)
→removes the "I ran that SQL in production and shouldn't have" risk
→Edge Function cold start reduction for user-facing endpoints restores the latency
→promise for products where response time is felt
→Type generation that stays current with schema changes without a manual regeneration step
→keeps the TypeScript layer accurate as the database evolves

Composability Notes

Pairs with `clerk-primary-user` for developers who use Clerk for auth and Supabase for the rest of the backend. Contrast with `planetscale-primary-user` for the full-backend-platform vs. MySQL-specialist tool philosophy. Use with `vercel-primary-user` for the full indie hacker deployment stack: Next.js + Supabase + Vercel.