At the end of June 2023 the team reviewed the C web request framework Peng Zechen had open sourced. The conclusion: the foundation was solid — request intake, parsing and forwarding worked, and the performance orientation was clear — what was missing was everything a product needs: a configuration system, certificate handling and operations experience. The ground was ready, a building could go on top.

With that judgement the team fixed its direction: not another practice project, but an open source web server in the spirit of Nginx, evolving on the same technical base. That decision shaped the July kickoff — when expired SSL certificates caused trouble again, the team did not start from scratch, but attached “make HTTPS work out of the box” to the same product line.