The product problem

Car history is usually fragmented across social posts, receipts, event photos, service notes, ownership paperwork, and memory. Garage-Pass makes the vehicle—not a generic feed—the durable center of that story.

Exact ownership

I own the product direction and work hands-on across interaction design, the SvelteKit frontend, Express services, API and data contracts, release tooling, deployment decisions, and production operations. This is an owned product, not a redesign exercise or isolated front-end mockup.

Architecture

The active frontend is a statically deployed SvelteKit 2 application using Svelte 5 runes and route-based code splitting. Firebase Hosting serves the frontend and rewrites API traffic to an Express 5 service on Cloud Run. Firestore is the production database; local development and most fast tests use SQLite through a shared adapter so business logic is not tied directly to either store.

Security and access

Short-lived JWT access tokens pair with rotating, hashed refresh tokens. Auth, route guards, rate limiting, input sanitization, and explicit production exposure rules protect member and administrative surfaces. The current public gate is deliberate product policy, not a broken homepage.

Tradeoffs

A static frontend plus independently scaled API keeps CDN delivery and server capacity separate, but requires disciplined client/API contracts. A dual SQLite/Firestore data layer makes local iteration and tests fast, but adapter parity becomes a release responsibility. The public launch gate reduces casual product review, so this page exposes the engineering proof without exposing member workflows.