Launching bigtonk.com

Recently, I launched bigtonk.com, a website for a friend of mine.

This site is part of a larger group of services, some done and some not. As far as this page goes, it’s built on a Postgres DB with Railway Functions for an API. I like these because they are super lightweight, cheap, and provide fast access to my database, so it’s perfect for small CRUD API’s. They run a small hono app I can run with bun nicely. There are endpoints for each table in the DB required to render the page.

A few days later I whipped up another Railway Function that runs on a cron every six hours and refreshes the 3 most recent videos and 6 most recent shorts from his YouTube channel. While I initially wrote the cron into the bun code, I later moved it out in favor of the cron functionality available as an option when configuring a service hosted on the platform. While it achieves the same thing, it’s much easier for me to monitor logs this way if I ever need to.

The next step is to build out the store tab. I have the UI built for this on the site side, there is a working cart and dummy products filled in, albeit hardcoded into the react components for now. I initially had plans to build out a minimal, but fully custom, ecommerce backend on a selfhosted Windmill instance, but after wasting a bunch of time reinventing several wheels, I decided to default back to MedusaJS which I have a fair amount of experience with.

So, the ecommerce backend at the time of writing is currently a second Postgres for Medusa, selfhosted Redis, Mellisearch and MinIO instances, and the Medusa backend.

Today’s task is to link up Medusa’s API with my frontend store components and kick out the placeholder data.