Launching Forged Chassis

Last month, I launched Forged Chassis, a website for a customer who manufacture 4x4 chassis. It's the first from scratch client project Half Systems has shipped.

The Build

The site was almost a static site but the customer wanted to manage their products in their catalogue via an admin panel and have a nice shopping list of features to come down the line. The customer and admin login is handled by AWS Cognito, which made adding custom claims to the JWT awkward, having to be done via a lambda.

To save myself from a nest of Javascript frameworks, the site is built with Go, Templ, HTMX and Tailwind CSS. It allows a backend developer to build a relatively nice looking frontend without too much hairloss.

The Launch Simplicity

Using AWS Lightsail (a first for me), the deployment all runs on a fixed $5 a month instance. The frontend, a product repository (a gRPC wrapper around Postgres) and Postgres. Systemd keeps everything up and running, and a simple install script to setup everything up. Down the line we might end up with containers and config management but for now we can enjoy the basic and they are easy to understand and fast.

What Went Right

The client is happy with the result. There is a lot more to come with this site. Especially as their business begins to take off.

As always, I appreciate any feedback or if you want to reach out, I'm @neuralsandwich on twitter and most other places.