Platforms built end to end, from the phone in an athlete's hand to the service behind it.

Skadi’s Edge gives archery coaches and the athletes they work with a shared picture of training. Athletes log sessions from their phone and get performance feedback on their shooting; coaches see the same data rolled up across their squad in a web dashboard.

Billing was the part that needed the most care. The coach platform subscribes through Stripe, while the in-app tier has to go through Play Billing and StoreKit, so the same entitlement arrives by three different routes. Stripe delivers webhooks at least once rather than exactly once, which means every handler for activation, renewal, cancellation and failed payment has to be idempotent — a replayed event must not double-charge anyone or resurrect a cancelled subscription.

It is in real use: four teams, and 75 archers with the app installed — 36 on Android, 39 on the iOS TestFlight build. Android is live on Google Play, published there in partnership with Stormpeak Performance, the coaching practice the product is built alongside; iOS is in TestFlight beta, and I am happy to add testers on request.

Skadi Events extends the Skadi platform from the practice field to the competition line. Where Skadi’s Edge handles day-to-day training, Events covers running a shoot: registration, scoring and results for organisers and participants.

Identity is the only thing the two products share, by design. Athletes and clubs carry one account across both through Firebase Auth, while Events keeps its own PostgreSQL database — competition data is relational in a way training logs are not, and a shared store would have coupled two products that change at different rates.

Money moves between three parties rather than two: entry fees are taken through Stripe Connect so that organisers are paid out for their own events, and webhooks reconcile each registration against its payment state. Because a failed reconciliation means someone shows up to a shoot without an entry, the payment path is exercised before it ships — against a simulated Stripe locally, and Stripe test mode on staging.

It is online and in soft launch — the platform is up and working, ahead of a wider push to organisers.

Archery Canada keeps the national records in four Google Sheets — indoor and outdoor, men’s and women’s. The old page linked out to those sheets through a document viewer, so looking up a record meant knowing which of the four to open and then reading a spreadsheet.

The constraint that shaped the build was who maintains the data. The records are kept in sheets by people who are not going to switch tools, so the sheets stay the system of record. A WordPress plugin syncs them on a schedule, caches each sheet on its own so one failed fetch can’t take out the rest, and serves the merged set from a REST route the front end reads once. Staff carried on editing the same spreadsheets; nothing about their workflow changed.

The interesting part was that the four-way split isn’t how anyone actually looks for a record. Para and field events cut across all four sheets, and the categories are free text — “60+ Compound unlimited”. So each row is parsed into discipline, age class, bow type, gender and classification, and the browser re-groups all thousand-plus records into Indoor, Outdoor, 3D/Field and Para with filters underneath. Everything loads once and filters in the browser, which is what makes it feel instant.

It is bilingual because a national sport organisation publishes in both official languages, and that goes past the buttons: the record taxonomy and every round name are translated too. Search is indexed in English and French at the same time, so “compound” and “poulies” both find the same record whichever language the page is in.