137 migrations and counting: building a personal OS schema from scratch

title: 137 migrations and counting: building a personal OS schema from scratch published: false description: How a weekend project to save contacts efficiently turned into a 147-table PostgreSQL schema powering a full personal operating system. Lessons, regrets, and a lot of ALTER TABLEs. tags: postgresql, database, architecture, selfhosted cover_image: I started this project on February 18th, 2026. The idea was embarrassingly simple: I wanted a personal assistant that could look up my contacts fast and without burning through tokens. Notes, emails, a diary — the basics. A small Fastify server, a PostgreSQL database, maybe ten tables. Somewhere along the way, I ended up with 137 SQL migrations. This is the story of how a "quick personal cloud" turned into what we now call a sovereign digital operating system — and what the schema evolution looks like when you're building the plane while flying it. Day 1: the schema that fit on a napkin Here's the first migration, 0000_initial_schema.sq