Week 010 — Getting Back Up

Two weeks off. The first week was planned. The second was not.

Week of December 9, 2024

Progress

The plan noted it plainly at the top of the week's entry: two weeks since the last session, Thanksgiving and then illness, and the self-doubt and paralysis that came with it. That's worth saying directly rather than glossing over.

Getting back in was mostly friction clearance. The machine had rebooted at some point during the gap, which meant getting Docker containers back up, restarting the Apache server, and relaunching the Stripe CLI listener before any actual work was possible. The runbook helped. Most of the startup sequence was already written down.

Once running, progress resumed on the webhook fulfillment side. The subscriptions table was in place from before the gap. This week: retrieving the Stripe product IDs and their associated start and end dates from the webhook payload, building the data structure needed to match them to srchParty's internal product records, and writing the subscription rows to the table.

By end of week, the Stripe product IDs were being extracted correctly from the payload and the internal lookup was working.

The Question That Appeared

Should srchParty use Stripe's product list as its own internal product list? The pricing table embeds Stripe's products directly — but the application still needs to know what those products mean internally. The answer was no: managing products in two places creates drift, and the internal representation is simple enough that it doesn't need Stripe to manage it for us.

Next Week

The webhook can write subscriptions to the database. What's left is surfacing that information to the user — moving subscription management into the user profile page and giving users a way to see and manage what they're signed up for.