In early July 2023 the iDeal studio again found several deployed web apps unreachable, and the root cause was once more an expired SSL certificate. The same failure kept coming back, which proved that relying on people to remember renewals does not work, so the studio decided to build an HTTPS proxy tool that configures certificates automatically. Led by Mr. Xiong, Peng Zechen and Zhang Yihe ran a feasibility study and wrote a small prototype in Go.

Once the prototype worked, the discussion moved from fixing one incident to whether to start an open source web server project. Mr. Xiong argued that the studio had mostly built enterprise and internet applications, and that a lower-level open source project was needed to spark interest, put computer science fundamentals to work and grow people; and that a web server should preferably be written in Go for development speed.

He also set a hard requirement: the server had to be genuinely used by the studio’s enterprise projects instead of staying a demo. He named the project Fast-Https himself — fast for speed, https for native HTTPS and SSL support. Fast-Https was officially started.