Hackathon category: Frankenstein
Inspiration
Local lifestyle apps are won or lost in one moment: the flash sale, when thousands of people tap the same coupon at once. Small merchants run those promotions on tools never built for that burst, and we wanted to build the platform we wished they had.
What it does
Local lifestyle apps are won or lost in one moment: the flash sale, when thousands of people tap the same coupon at once. Small merchants run those promotions on tools never built for that burst, and we wanted to build the platform we wished they had.
How we built it
with separate coupon and order services on the backend.
Challenges we ran into
The flash sale was three problems in one costume. Every user reads the same coupon row, so the cache either becomes a single key everyone pounds or stampedes the instant it expires.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
More than the numbers: we shipped search, sharing, flash sale, and ordering end to end in 60 days, from first spec in Kiro to a deployed URL.
What we learned
Reliability is a product feature, not an infrastructure detail. A user who loses a coupon at 20:00 doesn't think "the cache stampeded" — they think the app is broken and they don't come back.
What's next for Local Lifestyle and Merchant Services Platform
After that, multi-city rollout, where the cache and ordering design finally gets tested at real scale.
