November 2025. Elbow nerve compression from a multiple day bike trip — cubital tunnel syndrome. No riding for a while — physio's orders.
This sounds minor. It wasn't. I've been cycling obsessively for years. My brain runs on focus objects: things I research at 2am, things I price-track, things I think about when I should be doing something else. The bike was that thing. Without it, my brain immediately started looking for a replacement surrogate activities.
It found one: EDC.
The Rabbit Hole
EDC — Every Day Carry. If you're not familiar, think r/EDC on Reddit: people posting photos of what's in their pockets. Knives, flashlights, multitools, wallets, pens. A whole culture of gear that you actually use, every day, that earns its place in your pocket or bag.
I dove fast into this hole. Flashlight spec — lumens, CRI, throw vs flood, tint, driver modes, runtime curves. The endless steel debates — D2 vs VG-10, MagnaCut vs S35VN, and whether CPM-20CV is worth the price premium. The kind of research that feels productive but is mostly just fun.
After a while I figured out that EDC is just like TikTok — it hijacks your brain and gives you empty informational calories in return. Boys emotional support. I felt very guilty spending so much focus on a trap.
Reddit Isn't Enough
I kept bouncing between Reddit, YouTube, and Telegram groups. r/EDC is great — very active, great pictures. I noticed there EDC has similar dynamics as the Watch community - there's some high-end stuff with an active second hand marketplace.
But I noticed some gaps:
- The exchange markets (r/EDCexchange, r/Watchexchange) work, but they're detached from the community context.
- No inventory tracking. Every "what's in your collection" post is a write-once photo that disappears in the feed.
- No structured catalog. Reviews live in comment threads. No rating system, no comparison.
I wanted something that combined the community feel of Reddit with actual structure: gear pages with ratings, user loadouts you can browse and track, a place to advertise gear without a middleman.
EDCX
I don't have to hide: I felt very guilty spending so much focus and money on EDC. My thinking process was: I want something useful at the end of this process - redirect this energy into a productive channel. That's EDCX. Not a store, not a marketplace — a community. Users post pocket dumps, comment, rate gear, build their own inventory. When someone wants to sell or trade, they post it — EDCX doesn't intermediate, doesn't take cuts, doesn't touch the transaction. Think r/EDCexchange but attached to the actual community that cares about the gear.
Simple idea. Building it lean was the mental exercise my OCD brain craves.
The Technical Bets
Three bets I'd stand behind:
SQLite3 all the way
No Postgres, no RDS, no managed database costs. SQLite running on a host bind mount, served by Django.
The database is literally a file on disk. For an early-stage website, this is the right call: near-zero infra cost, zero ops overhead. Backups are just scp.
Performance is unmatched - something most people wouldn't assume.
Three PRAGMAs that unlock most of SQLite's performance ceiling:
PRAGMA journal_mode = WAL; -- writers don't block readers
PRAGMA mmap_size = 268435456; -- 256 MB memory-mapped I/O, reads go straight from page cache
PRAGMA synchronous = 1; -- NORMAL: fsync at checkpoints, not every commit
WAL (Write-Ahead Log) flips the default locking model: readers and the single writer run concurrently instead of queuing. mmap_size tells SQLite to map the database file directly into process memory — reads skip the syscall overhead entirely. synchronous = NORMAL trades a sliver of durability (safe under WAL — only a power loss right at a checkpoint can lose a commit) for far fewer fsync calls. Together they turn a "just a file" database into something that handles real concurrent traffic without breaking a sweat. DjangoCon Europe 2023 — Use SQLite in production by Tom Dyson gives a wonderful overview.
Star architecture — Node and NodeKind
Instead of separate database tables for users, gear items, posts, collections, and transactions, everything is a Node. A NodeKind distinguishes what it is. Relationships between nodes are just edges in the same graph. Everything is a Node. Node handles identity — shortcodes, slugs, timestamps — and every satellite entity links to it: Photos, Comments, Votes, Transactions. New content type? New NodeKind, zero migrations. Many projects walk into a tarpit because their schema grows without a strong conceptual model underneath — this sidesteps that.
Magiclink OTT + QR
Passwordless authentication. Users get a one-time token link by email — no password to forget, no account to recover.
The wonderful side benefit is an authentication bridge for mobile: scan the QR code on desktop, point your camera on mobile, tap — you're in. Onboarding for a gear community shouldn't feel like filling out tax forms. The passwordless path removes friction at the exact moment new users decide whether to stay.
Security overhead? Token invalidation, replay protection — all the usual concerns. Simple answer: store tokens in a cache backend (Memcached here). Cache naturally has TTL, so ephemeral tokens expire on their own. No cleanup jobs, no used_at columns, no stale token graveyard in the database.
Same Memcached instance doubles as Django's session backend (cached_db) — fast reads from cache, durable writes to SQLite as fallback. Memcached isn't an afterthought — it's the core of how auth works.
What's Next
EDCX is being built: an outlet for some technical thesis, an outlet for my obsessive focus. If you're into EDC — or just curious what a knife nerd with Django skills builds when his elbow won't let him ride — come find it.