FavourBee: shipping a production trust platform, solo
Mutual aid breaks two ways: money excludes the people who need help most, and public review systems are gameable and punitive. FavourBee's bet is a third path — earned, hard-to-fake trust instead of currency or ratings.
This is an engineering case study: a free mutual-aid network, built and deployed end-to-end by one developer — auth, data model, a Sybil-resistant trust graph, an emulator-tested authorization layer, and full Canadian privacy-compliance tooling. Live at favourbee.ca .
Solo
built end-to-end
16
Cloud Functions
218-line
emulator-tested rules
EN / FR
bilingual PWA
Architecture
A thin client over callable Cloud Functions, with the integrity-critical logic enforced in tested security rules — not trusted to the browser.
Four hard problems, four decisions
What the build actually required — and how each was solved.
1Sybil-resistance without currency
Admission is a web-of-trust: a member is reachable only through earned vouches from already-trusted members, anchored on Hive coordinators. A bounded, hop-limited multi-source traversal computes the trusted set and fails closed at a node budget.
Unit-tested against a 10,000-fake-account flood: leakage stays bounded by the number of attacker vouch edges, not the number of accounts created. Same Sybil-resistance principle as Cairn — implemented clean-room in TypeScript.
2The authorization model is the product
All the integrity-critical logic lives in a 218-line Firestore security-rules model, not in client code: multi-tenant (one identity, many Hives), owner-only coordinator promotion (anti-coup), standing and verified flags that can never be self-written, and confirmations that are write-once by the real receiver.
Covered by a Firebase emulator test suite — the rules are tested, not assumed. This is where most "shipped" Firebase apps cut corners.
3Privacy & safety by design
Geo is opt-in and coarsened (~110 m, distance-only display). Safety concerns route privately to coordinators — there is no public review wall to game or weaponize. High-stakes favours gate on a Vulnerable-Sector-Check attestation.
Full PIPEDA / Quebec Law 25 tooling: subject-access data export, right-to-erasure that anonymizes others’ surviving records, a consent trail, CASL one-click signed unsubscribe, and data residency in Montreal.
4Production hardening, end to end
Passwordless email-link sign-in plus TOTP MFA. A self-healing PWA service worker recovers from stale caches. A custom bilingual prerenderer emits 26 crawlable static pages with per-page SEO and hreflang.
Pragmatic platform calls with documented rationale — callable functions over Firestore triggers (Eventarc isn’t supported in the Montreal region), and a dedicated email sender over the spam-prone default.
Honest status
FavourBee is live in production but pre-adoption. The honest risk isn't the software — it's whether a host community and real people use it. The platform is built; traction is the open question.
Enforced
Admission boundary, standing integrity, and authorization — server-side in tested rules.
Advisory
The serve-rate fairness throttle currently runs client-side as an advisory gate.
Simulated
Fairness metrics come from an economic simulation, not production measurement — labeled as such.
Stating exactly what is enforced vs. advisory vs. simulated is deliberate — the same results-not-claims discipline that runs through all of this work.
What it demonstrates
Full-stack, shipped
A real product taken from data model to deployment by one person — not a prototype.
Security-first
Authorization, multi-tenancy, and anti-abuse treated as the core, and tested — not bolted on.
Compliance & i18n
PIPEDA / Law 25 / CASL tooling and a bilingual surface, built in from the start.
Why this one matters to me
I built FavourBee out of my own lived experience of needing help and a community to lean on. It's proof to myself that verifiable trust can serve real people, not just institutions — and the reason the rest of this work exists.
See it, or talk shop
The product is live; the engineering above is the point. Open to senior engineering roles, research collaborations, and partnerships.