Autism Friendly Care

Why it exists

Finding a dentist or doctor who knows how to care for an autistic patient mostly happens by word of mouth. Families need specifics before they book, like which accommodations a practice actually offers. No directory had them.

I co-founded Autism Friendly Care to fix that, and I’m building it.

What I built

• Next.js 16 (App Router) running on Cloudflare Workers through OpenNext, with D1 and Drizzle for data and Tailwind v4 for styling
• Provider data starts from the federal NPI registry. The import script handles all 3.17M rows.
• Geocoding runs through Geocodio. I ruled out Google and HERE because their terms don’t allow storing coordinates permanently. The map runs on Leaflet and PMTiles with OpenStreetMap data.
• Email goes through Resend. If the key is missing locally, mail lands in a dev outbox table instead of failing.

Principles, enforced in code

Ranking is payment-blind by design, and verification can’t be bought. There are no star ratings, popups, or tricks to keep you clicking. The rules are written down, and the code and its tests enforce them.

Shipping safely

• A launch gate keeps the site private until a written readiness register says it’s ready
• make check runs a lockfile check, typecheck, lint, a color contrast check, and unit tests before any deploy
• Playwright runs against the site with the gate both closed and open
• A separate watchdog Worker probes the site every 5 minutes and emails on failure. It deploys on its own, so a bad site deploy can’t take down its own monitor.
• D1 Time Travel gives 30 days of point-in-time restore

Status

Private beta. We’re preparing a national soft launch, with outreach starting in Charlotte.