Hono is a lightweight, runtime-agnostic web framework built for the edge: the same code can run on Node, Cloudflare Workers, Deno, or Bun with little to no change. That edge-first design, plus its growing traction as a modern REST/API layer, is why it’s showing up in backend job postings that care about performance and deploy flexibility — these Hono apps build toward exactly that kind of role.

The domain is e-commerce checkout, deliberately: a product catalog and cart are the simplest possible version of the kind of consumer-facing purchase flow that shows up at real scale in industry. Each app in this series goes deeper — starting with catalog and cart basics, then a full checkout flow with real authentication and a genuine production deploy to Cloudflare Workers.

Projects build on each other.

1Product Catalog and Cart Basics
A shopper can browse a product catalog and build up a cart — add an item, and it either finds their existing cart or creates one on the spot, tracking quantities per session. Built to prove out the full request lifecycle end to end: real Postgres persistence behind every route, input rejected before it ever reaches the database if it’s malformed, and a foreign-key relationship that stops a cart item from ever pointing at a product that doesn’t exist.
Postgres · Drizzle ORM | Zod validation | Vitest · 6 tests | TypeScript
2Full Checkout Flow (in progress)
A complete checkout experience with real authentication and a genuine production deploy.
JWT auth | Cloudflare Workers deploy | React + Zustand | Playwright | vitests