Walidayn

Inspiration

A woman of 70 went into a retirement home in Quebec. They served her pork. She came home to her family in tears and asked why the Muslims of Quebec never built a home that could look after her. We are not going to build a retirement home this weekend. We can build the thing that lets her stay in her own home, with her own family, and her wishes travelling with whoever walks in the door.

The name comes from Surah Al-Isra: "if one or both of them reach old age with you." Walidayn, الوالدين, the two parents.

What it does

Three siblings share their mother's care. Today that lives in a WhatsApp group nobody can search and in one person's memory, so nobody knows who gave the last dose. Walidayn gives the family one record: the routine, today's plan, what was actually done and by whom, and a handoff that writes itself and lands on every phone. Their mother gets her own big-type screen and one button that says I need help. When she goes to the emergency room, fourteen days of the record print on one page.

How we built it

Every action is an event. Redis Streams is the log, a projector builds Postgres read models, a notifier writes alerts, and the phones talk over server-sent events. The web app is vanilla JavaScript with WebCrypto and no build step. Six containers, one command. The family key is generated in the browser and never sent, so the server stores ciphertext and routing metadata only. A test asserts that a logged note appears in no database row, no stream entry and no API response. 119 tests.

What we learned

We read six caregiving communities before we wrote the pitch: 241,922 members, the 570 most-read posts of the past year, 303 of which describe the same failure, and 87 separate threads asking for exactly this tool, every year since 2017. Every answer they got was a calendar, a reminder or a pill box. Nobody had built the record.

What's next

Five Montreal families for a month, starting Monday. Key recovery before any new feature, because losing every device currently means losing the record. Then Urdu and Arabic for her screen, and a scoped key so a support worker sees only what the family chose to share.