Caribbein — Engineering
Notes from building the estate
/geek is the door; this is the library behind it. Rewrite post-mortems, the multi-tenancy decision, the cataloguing pipeline, the guards and the scars that made them. Written the way we would want to read it: mechanisms rather than product names, decisions with the alternatives we rejected, and the failures left in.
4,941 lines, then 69
The file every OS talks to the database through had quietly become one OS. What the rewrite kept, what it deleted, and the guard that keeps it deleted.
Read the note → DecisionOne database, nineteen worlds
Tenant column, database per tenant, or schema per OS — the multi-tenancy trade-off, and the migration rules that make the middle path hold.
Read the note → PipelineHow you catalogue a sea
Nine thousand providers across twenty-nine islands, none of them scraped-and-dumped: source ranking, reversible passes, verdicts, and honest placeholders.
Read the note → CultureTen guards, ten scars
Every guard in our CI exists because something specific went wrong. The incident behind each one, and why they all run without a database, a browser, or a key.
Read the note → ReferenceThe stack, and how to check it
Technologies by role, not by logo. Dependency budgets probed from the lockfiles, no version numbers on purpose, and a check attached to every claim.
Read the reference → ReferenceThe public read API, as observed
The endpoints your browser already calls, documented honestly: no contract yet, no version, and exactly what the marketplace itself reads.
Read the reference → RecordsDecision records
Four architecture decisions in ADR form — context, the alternatives we rejected, and what each choice costs us on purpose.
Read the records →House rules for these notes
- Mechanisms, never identifiers. A note can go as deep as it likes into how something works; it never names a thing you could reach.
- Every number loads from a dated file: eng-facts.json. Numbers are re-probed when a note ships, never copied forward.
- Both languages, every string, checked by machine. Code stays in English, as code does.
- Everything reads with JavaScript off, honours reduced-motion, and fits a phone.
- There is a feed: feed.xml. New notes land there first.