Blog.
Notes from building Queue, Heimdal, Pages and Memories. Written when there is something worth writing down, not on a schedule.
One switch, two processors
— PayMongo reaches every wallet in the Philippines and almost nothing outside it. Lemon Squeezy reaches the rest of the world and files the tax. The trick was keeping them behind one function.
Walkthrough: making a Memory
— Every step between a photo on your phone and a print that plays it back, screen by screen.
Where vibe coding breaks
— An AI-written sign-in check paged through every user to find one. It worked, it read fine, and it was a scale cliff waiting for account 501.
What Memories is
— A card, a magnet or a badge that plays a video back when you tap or scan it. Paid once, yours forever, no subscription attached.
Write now, lock later
— Chrome's NFC stack crashes outright on the phone that encodes every Memory. The fix wasn't stopping the crash, it was making sure it never cost more than itself.
Who gets a socket
— The connection ceiling from the last post is fixed. Not by trimming bytes, by deciding who is allowed to hold a socket at all.
Egress is the bottleneck
— Three apps on one free tier. I thought I would run out of CPU or storage. I was running out of bandwidth, and then out of something worse.
The bug that only existed in production
— Publishing updated the database and the page carried on serving yesterday's HTML. Dev never showed it, because dev has no CDN.
How Heimdal works
— A door kiosk that reads a face on the device, keeps recording through an outage, and reconciles afterwards.
How Queue works
— Customers join the line from their phone, and every screen in the room agrees on who is next.
What Pages is
— One address for everything you are, claimed in about twenty seconds, with no subscription attached to it.
Walkthrough: making a Page
— Every screen between an empty address bar and a page with your name on it.
Walkthrough: running a line with Queue
— Setting up a queue, putting it on the door, and serving from it, screen by screen.
Walkthrough: a day at the door with Heimdal
— Pairing a kiosk, enrolling a group, the walk-up itself, and everything the office sees afterwards.