I broke out all our code for displaying public content into a few different microservices so my sites could easily grab them, which allowed me to play with different frameworks and ways to display our content (blog posts and directory/references for biology). The new content microservices endpoints are also a public (though undocumented) API as an extra bonus.

Basically it gave me the flexibility to work faster, and generating the code (e.g. the REST endpoint or the Svelte/Sapper front-end) is also a lot faster, and I get to host them on Vercel for free

Oh and it also helps me to separate business logic code and other not-so-public data to somewhere else (Heroku instead of Vercel) and it just runs completely separately. That way I don't have to worry about accidentally sharing data

As a solo designer/engineer this Vercel + microservices / tiny APIs + tiny frontends makes my life much easier