Issue #16 - The Spark and the Setup

The Idea That Wouldn’t Let Go

Let me take you back.

I was scrolling through a product page online — something shiny, something tempting. $249. Not crazy expensive, but I paused. I thought to myself:

"How many hours of work is that actually costing me?"

That’s when it hit me — this should be automatic. What if I had a Chrome extension that showed me exactly how many work hours any price equated to based on my hourly wage?

And just like that, Time for Price was born.

A small, helpful idea…

...that would drag me into the deepest corners of AWS.

I’m really excited about this, but let me tell you… building it has been a journey.

BUILDING THE BACKBONE

The extension itself was straightforward.

But I wanted a simple landing page to explain what it does, collect interest, and maybe even grow an email list.

For that, I went with something familiar and clean: Java with Spring Boot.

The challenge? Hosting it.

I didn’t want shared hosting. I wanted it to scale and feel real. That’s when I picked AWS Elastic Beanstalk — the “easy” way to deploy full-stack apps.

Yeah... "easy."

I wrote about why I couldn’t use Vercel for this project on my last issue.

STEP 1: DEPLOYING THE SPRING BOOT APP

So I compiled the Spring Boot app into a .jar file — something like time-for-price-web-1.0.0.jar — and uploaded it into Elastic Beanstalk using the web console.

💡 Pro tip I learned the hard way:

If you're using Spring Boot, your app runs on port 8080 by default.

Elastic Beanstalk expects your app to respond on port 5000 — or whatever you configure. (I genuinely still don’t get why it does this.)

So in the Elastic Beanstalk environment settings, I added:

Boom. That did the trick.

For a moment, it actually worked. I had a live site!

But then came the dreaded lock icon 🔓 open,

which means, "Not Secure" warning.

SSL: THE START OF A SAGA

You can’t go live without HTTPS anymore. Chrome, or any browser during this era, literally shames your site if it’s not secure.

So I did what any sane person would do:

→ I opened AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)

→ Requested an SSL cert for my domain (timeforprice.com)

→ Verified ownership via DNS in Route 53

Done, right?

Nope.

Because now I had to figure out how to attach that certificate to my Elastic Beanstalk environment.

Spoiler: Elastic Beanstalk uses a Load Balancer under the hood.

So you have to configure that Load Balancer to use your SSL cert which I did not want to use because of, well… too expensive.

I’ll explain how I totally messed that up in Issue 2. But let’s just say, at this point… I thought everything needed to be rebuilt.

CLOSING THOUGHTS — THE REALITY OF “SIMPLE PROJECTS”

Let me be real:

I didn’t expect setting up a landing page to be this intense.

But here’s what I’ve learned: if it’s worth doing well, it’s going to get messy.

Next time, I’ll tell you how I accidentally nuked my Elastic Beanstalk environment thinking I had to — and what I should’ve done instead.

Stay tuned. It gets wild.

🎬 Teaser for Issue 2: