FairwayPlan is live. Go to fairwayplan.com, work through the wizard, and you'll get an actual itinerary back. Still a bit surreal, honestly, watching it run on your own laptop is one thing. Watching it work on a real domain with a proper SSL cert is something else entirely.
What “live” means here
Single DigitalOcean droplet. Next.js on the frontend, FastAPI on the backend, a couple of small microservices handling the route optimisation and weather lookups, PostgreSQL and Redis underneath all of it. Nginx out front managing traffic and SSL via Let's Encrypt.
Cloudflare sits in front of that, handling DNS, proxying, a buffer against anything weird.
Total running cost: a few dollars a month. Deliberate choice. I didn't want the infrastructure bill pushing me toward monetising something before it's actually ready.
When the infrastructure is cheap, you are free to build what is right instead of what pays for itself.
The bit that surprised me
Honestly, the deployment itself wasn't bad. Docker Compose makes the local-to-server transition fairly predictable. If it ran on my machine, it mostly ran on the droplet.
What ate the time was the accumulation of small things you only discover once you're running on a real domain under HTTPS.
An nginx config that needed reworking for SSL. A container IP that nginx had cached across a rebuild and quietly refused to update. An environment variable that turned out to need living in the build args rather than as a runtime secret, a subtle difference, annoying to track down.
None of it hard. All of it fiddly. Standard shipping-software experience, I suspect.
The accumulation of small things you only discover once you are running on a real domain under HTTPS.
What's in the app right now
370 courses across 16 New Zealand regions. A five-step wizard to capture your preferences. A Mixed Integer Programming solver that schedules your rounds against budget, drive times, and sunset windows. A three-tier weather system pulling live forecasts for near-term trips and historical averages for anything further out. Itinerary sharing via a short code. Booking link on every course card.
Free to use. No account. No login. Just plan a trip.
What's coming
There's enough going on under the hood to warrant a proper architecture post, saving that for separately. Near-term focus is the mobile experience and per-day budget preferences, so you can tell the planner to hold something back for a marquee course on your last day without doing the maths yourself.
If you're heading to New Zealand and you play golf, give it a go. And if something feels off, I genuinely want to know.