I’m Building “WayToClear” - A Travel Compliance Platform

Vigneshwaran Manivannan — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:44:11 +0000

Hi developers

I'm building a side project called WayToClear.

WayToClear is a "know before you go" travel compliance platform focused on tourist travelers.

The goal is to help users understand things like:

Tourist visa & entry rules
Filming, vlogging & drone regulations
Cultural do’s & don’ts
Restricted & banned items
Emergency info & local basics
Transportation availability
Popular taxi rental services in their countries
Famous places to visit

Current scope

To avoid over-engineering, I intentionally limited the scope (one to many) for now:

Citizenship: India

Purpose: Tourist travel only

Countries supported (for now):

United Arab Emirates
Japan
Thailand
Sri Lanka

Each country shows summarized guidance, official links, and a “last verified” date.

The challenge I'm facing 😣

The technical part is easy.
The data maintenance part is hard.

Visa rules and travel regulations:

Change often
Differ by citizenship
Are maintained by governments, not developers

If I expand to 15–20 countries, the workload increases massively.
And when a country changes its visa policy, keeping data up-to-date becomes stressful for a solo builder.

What I’m NOT trying to do

❌ Replace embassy websites
❌ Provide legal guarantees
❌ Cover all countries & all visa types

What I AM trying to do

Provide practical guidance for tourists
Clearly show last verified dates & official sources
Help travelers avoid surprises before flying

What I'd love advice on from the community

How do similar platforms manage frequently changing policy data?
Is a "last verified + official link" approach acceptable?

Should I:

Keep the country count low and go deep?
Focus on a niche (vloggers, drone users, digital creators)?
Any ideas for community-assisted updates or sustainable workflows?

Why I’m sharing this early

I want to build this with realistic expectations, not burn out trying to be perfect.

If you've built:

Data-heavy products
Compliance-based platforms
Travel or government-policy tools

I'd really value your experience.

Thanks for reading 🙌 I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback from the community.

WayToClear Site: https://waytoclear.vercel.app

Why Testing Only 200 OK Is Lying to Yourself

Vigneshwaran Manivannan — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 09:56:52 +0000

And How I Built “Status Code as a Service” for Fun
Most applications work perfectly. Until the backend stops returning 200 OK?

As developers, we spend a lot of time building and testing the happy path — APIs returning 200 OK, clean JSON responses, smooth UI flows. But real-world systems don’t live in that world.

They live in a much messier place:

404 429 500 503

And if your frontend or client code has never seen those responses during development, it’s usually not prepared for them in production.

The Problem With “Mocking Success”
In many projects, error handling is tested in one of three ways:

Not tested at all
Manually faked by changing code
Mocked with static responses

All three approaches miss something important: real HTTP behavior.

HTTP status codes are not just numbers. They influence:

Retry logic, UI state transitions, Caching behavior, Rate limiting flows, User experience under failure.

Mocking a 500 inside application code is not the same as receiving an actual 500 from an API.

A Small Side Project (Inspired by “No as a Service”)
While exploring this problem, I came across the fun project No as a Service, which simply returns “no” via an API.

That sparked a thought:

What if we had something similar — but for HTTP status codes?

Not a serious product.
Not a startup idea.
Just a small, learning-focused side project.

That’s how Status Code as a Service (SCaaS) started.

What Is Status Code as a Service?
Status Code as a Service is a lightweight HTTP API that returns real HTTP status codes on demand.

It supports:

Deterministic responses (/status/404)
Random status codes
Weighted distributions (more realistic than pure randomness)
Category-based responses (success, client error, server error)

The idea is simple:
let your frontend or API client experience real failures during development.

So instead of returning them directly, the API simulates them safely by:

Returning 200 OK
Including the intended status code in the response payload
It’s a small detail — but it highlights how HTTP behavior can differ from theory once real infrastructure is involved.

Why This Was Useful (Even as a “Fun” Project)
Even though this started as a casual experiment, it turned out to be genuinely useful for:

Testing frontend error states
Verifying retry and backoff logic
Understanding how APIs behave under rate limits
Simulating partial outages
Learning how CDNs and proxies treat HTTP responses

Most importantly, it reinforced one idea:

If you don’t test failure, you haven’t really tested your system.

Keeping It Simple
The project is intentionally minimal:

Stateless
No database
Node.js + Express
Clear, predictable behavior
It’s open-source, easy to run locally, and easy to deploy.

If someone finds it useful — great.
If not — it was still a valuable learning experience.

Final Thought
Testing only 200 OK responses gives a false sense of confidence.

Real systems fail.
Networks fail.
APIs fail.

Your application should be ready for that — before production finds out for you.

GitHub: https://github.com/Vigneshmani28/statuscode-as-a-service

Live url: https://scaas.onrender.com/

My portfolio: https://vigneshdev.in

DEV Community: Vigneshwaran Manivannan

I’m Building “WayToClear” - A Travel Compliance Platform

Why Testing Only 200 OK Is Lying to Yourself