Hi, I’ve decided I’m going to get serious about making an actual project with what I’ve learned so far. Some time ago I had several ideas including making something AI or ML-related, but reality (and limitations of free time) kicked in so I think I’ll start even simpler: A landing page that talks about another project I’ve got in mind. The goal is basically to get a notion of whether there might be interest in the idea or not, and I could use that go gauge how much effort I should put into building the actual thing (which I plan to also use Elixir for!) and whether it’d merit pulling some all nighters

So far my only “real” project is this sort of library where I tried to implement compile-time validations for newtypes, but it feels very hacky, and I think vanilla Elixir with its pattern matching already addresses making illegal states unrepresentable. I might use it for this project, but more for testing purposes.

I digress, the real point here is I am sorta putting together a checklist, and would absolutely welcome some extra eyes/help and opinions. I’d like to deploy it on AWS infra, which I haven’t touched in quite a while. I’m not worried about this thing being super scalable, and like to keep things as simple as possible… for simplicity’s sake if I can get away without even using a DB and just use an opensource tool or one with a generous free tier for keeping track of visits, impressions, and the emails of people who want to receive updates on the project, I would. I say this since it’ll be my first time deploying an app entirely by myself including managing VPCs, subnets, etc, so security-wise it’d be the easiest thing for me, but otherwise I absolutely have nothing against using a database.

So I’m thinking I will start with:

• probably no LiveView, just plain old html views
• Google Analytics or similar for keeping count of visits
• MailerLite or similar for the “newsletter”
• run my Elixir + Phoenix app on a cheap EC2 instance (maybe in an ASG)
• CloudFront for static files?

Is there anything else I should keep in mind? Any suggestions, recommendations, tips, gotchas, etc?