Most of Cameroon has no street addressing. Every product in the group — food delivery, ride-hailing, parcels — was inventing its own way to describe where a place is, and none of them agreed.
What I did about it
One permanent code per building (BA-UPS-00432), with a QR code and a public shareable page.
Built as independent shared infrastructure rather than a feature of any one product, so all six consumers read from the same source of truth.
The public address page is server-rendered — it's the artefact behind every QR code, so it must render for crawlers and produce a link preview on WhatsApp.
What I rejected, and why
No migrations and no backups on data that cannot be regenerated. The most serious open risk in the fleet, and named as such.
No migrations and no backups on data that cannot be regenerated — every building's permanent address code exists in exactly one place. This is the most serious open risk in the whole fleet and it is infrastructure, not code.