ok so this week was a big one. been building amelu, which is basically an email hosting thing, self-hosted mail server (stalwart) under the hood but with a normal dashboard on top so people don’t have to touch config files to get a working inbox on their own domain.

spent a good chunk of time on the backend. it’s go, talks to postgres directly (no orm, just raw sql, which honestly i like more than i expected). moved a bunch of stuff around cloudflare’s stack too, pages for the frontend, a worker sitting in front of the api, tunnel connecting into the actual server since i didn’t want to expose postgres or the mail server to the open internet. found and fixed a nasty bug where the worker was silently eating oauth redirects lol, that one took a minute to track down.

also wired up stripe billing properly, rotated us off the test key onto live, which broke checkou

biggest thing though: built a whole admin surface so we (ordnary staff) can actually manage amelu customers from inside helm, which is our internal company dashboard. domains, mailboxes, subscriptions, all of it, without needing to ssh into anything or run raw sql against prod. it’s hmac signed between the two services so every action gets attributed to whoever did it. also added a little workspace switcher in the sidebar so you can flip between “ordnary helm” and “ordnary amelu” like switching tabs.

on top of that, built the actual marketing site from scratch. real screenshots, real pricing, wrote a whole custom license since amelu is source available but not like, fork-it-and-compete-with-us open source. also did the seo stuff properly, og images, structured data, all that.

still a lot left to do but it feels like a real product now instead of a pile of scripts. onward.