Tag: architecture

I Built Two Stripe Integrations in the Same Codebase. They Share Almost Zero Billing Code.

Why per-session payments and prepaid credit systems demand completely different architectures — even when they use the same Stripe account, the same API keys, and the same developer.

We Run Cron Jobs Inside the Bun Server Process (And You Should Too)

How we replaced system cron and external job runners with an in-process scheduler in Bun — featuring drift correction, job deduplication, error isolation, and why fewer moving parts means fewer 3 AM pages.

Stop Deducting Credits Immediately — Your Billing System Is a Ticking Time Bomb

Why naive credit deduction causes race conditions, phantom charges, and support nightmares — and how the hold-confirm-release pattern with automatic TTL expiration eliminates an entire category of billing bugs.

40 Languages, 400KB Bundle — Why I Refuse to Ship Translations in JavaScript

How dynamic translation loading with client-side caching serves 40 locales without bloating the SPA bundle, keeping the React app under 400KB while supporting instant language switching.

Your SSE Connections Are Lying to You — Here's What Happens When Users Reconnect

Most Server-Sent Events implementations have a silent reliability hole. The event replay pattern guarantees reconnecting clients never miss a billing update, payment approval, or session state change.

I Made Billing Invisible. Now My Developers Ship Paid Features Without Writing a Single Line of Payment Code.

How Vibe's billingGuard middleware intercepts paid API calls, pushes approval requests via SSE, auto-renders payment modals, and settles transactions — without feature developers touching payment logic.

Our Mentoring Platform Was Bleeding $17 Per Overrun Session. Then I Built a Timer That Kills Zoom Calls.

How I built an in-memory billing engine that broadcasts millisecond-accurate charges via Server-Sent Events, escalates balance warnings, and automatically terminates Zoom meetings when credits run out.

HMAC-Signed Vibe-to-Vibe Calls: How We Stopped Micro-Apps from Impersonating Each Other

Inside the HMAC-signed request protocol that secures inter-app communication on the Vibe platform — where every micro-app runs in its own Cloudflare Worker sandbox and no one trusts anyone.

Layered Authorization in Elysia.js: Why Your Middleware Is Doing Too Much

How we built composable authorization layers using Elysia's derive() and scoped middleware — replacing a monolithic auth check with elegant derive chains that narrow permissions at every step.

Your SaaS Handles Money With a Balance Column. That's Why Your Numbers Don't Add Up at 2 AM.

How I built NostroLedger — a double-entry accounting system inside PostgreSQL that tracks every cent flowing through a real-time mentoring platform, and why 700-year-old bookkeeping principles will save your startup.

Every User Gets Their Own Database. The Billing Architecture That Shouldn't Work — But Outperforms Everything.

How Vibe gives every user their own bank.sqlite for credits, holds, and transactions — the hold/confirm/release pattern, 5-minute TTL self-healing, and why database-per-user scales better than you think.

Our Entire SaaS Is One 13,870-Line File. We Tried Splitting It. We Put It Back.

The case for keeping a micro-SaaS as a single Elysia.js monolith — where the seams are, why we reverted the extraction, and why premature decomposition is the root of all evil.

We Use Subdomains as Security Boundaries. No Kubernetes. No Containers. Just Directories.

Inside Vibe's multi-tenancy architecture where every user's micro-app gets its own subdomain, filesystem, derived secret key, and SQLite database — all on a single server process.

We Built a 340-Line Static Site Generator That Made Next.js Irrelevant. It Renders 480 Pages in 650ms.

How mentoring.oakoliver.com generates 40 locales × 12 routes at server startup using React 19, hydrates with React Query, and why we'll never go back to a framework for this.