What it is
Howi is an app for people who love driving. Start a ride and it tracks your route the whole way; tap record to film the best stretches, as many clips as you like. Afterwards you replay the drive on a real map, with each clip lit up on the stretch of road it was filmed on.
It’s social too: friends, group rides you can plan, invite people to and join, routes you can publish and discover, and one-tap posting of a ride to Instagram as a ready-made carousel.
Building it together
Howi has three co-founders, and we’re building it together. The concept app came first and proved the idea; my job is making it production-ready: something real people can sign up to, trust with their data, and that we can keep shipping to safely.
Production-ready
- Foundations: a clean production branch built up from a minimal skeleton, Node pinned, Dependabot and a pull-request template, so changes land through review
- Releases: builds through Expo’s EAS, with over-the-air updates for JavaScript changes and TestFlight for the beta
- Data: Supabase with row-level security, and the schema managed as migrations, not hand edits
- The website: howirides.com, described below
howirides.com
The website runs on the same accounts as the app. People can sign up, sign in and edit their profile there today, ahead of launch.
- Astro, server-rendered, in a Docker container on Cloud Run, behind Firebase Hosting’s CDN
- Every Supabase call happens on the server. The browser never holds a token: the session is an httpOnly, Secure, SameSite cookie, checked on every request
- The pages work without JavaScript
- Signed-in pages are never cached by the CDN
- Keyless deploys from GitHub Actions through Workload Identity Federation, as a service account that can deploy the site and nothing else