BUILDING IN KOREA
Manballers Devlog — Episode 02
GitHub? Never Heard of It — Installing Everything, Then a Map Appeared
Three accounts, two unfamiliar programs, one PowerShell error that ate 30 minutes — and then, out of nowhere, a real map on my screen.
In Episode 1, I settled on the idea. Now I actually had to build it. I had no idea where to even start, so I asked Claude: “What do I need to do first, right now?” The answer was to create three accounts.
01
GitHub, Vercel, Supabase — Names I’d Never Heard
GitHub, Claude explained, is where code gets stored. Vercel puts the site you build onto the internet. Supabase is the database that holds your data.
Honestly, the explanations didn’t fully land. I just made the accounts because I was told to. The nice surprise: both Vercel and Supabase let me log in directly with my GitHub account. Simpler than I expected.
02
Google Cloud — I Hesitated at the Card Registration
Using the Google Maps API meant creating a Google Cloud account — and registering a card. I froze for a second. Was this going to start costing money?
Claude walked me through it: $200 in free credit every month, and traffic at the scale of a latte map would never come close to using it. The card was just for identity verification.
I registered it anyway, nervously. Amount billed so far: $0.
03
VS Code, Node.js — Installing Everything
VS Code is the editor where you write code. Node.js is something like the engine that runs Next.js. Both were just download-the-installer-and-click-next situations.
Then the Node.js install screen threw options at me — Docker, nvm, fnm. I asked Claude, who told me to just pick nvm with npm. So I did.
04
The PowerShell Error That Cost Me 30 Minutes
Finally, the step where I’d create the actual Next.js project. I typed the command into the VS Code terminal, and red errors poured out.
“This system cannot run scripts because…”
A Windows security setting was blocking it. Claude gave me the fix, and one command solved it. Finding that one command took 30 minutes.
05
The Map Appeared
And then, finally. I typed http://localhost:3000 into the browser, and a map of Seoul filled the screen.
From a blank white page to an actual Google Map, live on my screen. It happened faster than I expected, and it felt better than I expected too.
I hadn’t written a single line of code that I understood. And a real map was on my screen anyway.
Up Next
Episode 03 — The Map Was Up. Now What About Money?
The cold math on ad revenue, why café SaaS sounds better than it works at zero traffic, and the blunt line from Claude that made me abandon the latte map for good.