Handshakers

Handshakers started from a specific, real problem: teams that share a single account on a platform — a common setup for contractor pools — have no fair way to split what that account earns. Whoever logs the most convincingly wins, not whoever actually worked the hours. I wanted a tool that made the split honest by construction, not by trust.

The payout math itself is simple — each person's share of the total logged time, applied against whatever the platform actually reported paying out, so a shortfall adjusts everyone down proportionally instead of landing on one person. The harder problem was making the underlying log impossible to game. Every entry is a relay: a new log's start time locks to the previous one's stop time, so there's no way to log a gap that inflates your hours or a range that overlaps someone else's.

Two people sharing one clock meant collisions were the real engineering problem, not the UI. A live presence channel broadcasts when someone's actively typing a stop time, so teammates see the field lock in real time instead of racing to submit first — and because a UI lock alone isn't enough, every submission also runs a pre-flight check against the database's actual latest entry before writing, aborting with a timeline-collision warning if someone snuck a log in first.