FEWO Search
Full-stack · booking platform
Express
SQLite
SQL
SSE
Role
Design, front-end & backend
Year
2026
A holiday-rental portal built on a raw Airbnb export: 1,476 listings, 504,795 calendar nights and 103,295 reviews, behind a search, a booking flow and a live availability feed. Express and SQLite on the server, hand-written JS in the browser. No front-end framework, no build step.
1476
listings
504k
calendar nights
23
API endpoints
0
front-end frameworks
01 — Finding something
Search first, form second
The dataset is 1,476 listings in one city. Small enough to browse, large enough that browsing gets you nowhere. So the landing page is a search bar and a carousel, and everything that narrows the set sits one popover away, visible when you want it and gone when you do not.
Landing
Filters
All listings
02 — Booking it
The calendar is the product
Half a million calendar rows exist to answer one question honestly: can I have these nights, and what do they cost. Every rule below is checked in the browser so the answer is instant, and again on the server so the answer is true.
Availability
Booking form
Confirmation
03 — Deciding the interface
What each screen is instead of
A booking interface has an obvious version, and the dataset kept breaking it. Each decision below beat a more conventional one, and it lost for a reason that came out of the data rather than out of taste. They are written as pairs, what it is and what it is instead of, because a decision with no discarded alternative was never really a decision.
04 — Under it
What the server actually does
Ten dependencies, eight routers, one SQLite file. The interesting part was never a single endpoint. It was deciding which problems deserved a library and which deserved twenty lines.
05 — Admin & leftovers
The plain half, and what is still wrong
The admin side is deliberately plain: an import form, a dashboard, a dark-mode switch. Four things are still wrong and I would rather write them down than crop them out of a screenshot. The login token lives in localStorage, which CSP and escaping make less bad but do not fix. bookings.json is rewritten after every change and never read back, so it is a mirror pretending to be a store. The 2-minute reservations sit in memory and vanish on restart. And the pay button charges nobody.
Profile — admin section
Every decision on this project, written down, including the ones that turned out wrong. Twenty pages. Nobody has to read it.