Hi dev.to π
I'm Andres. Long-time builder, first-time dev.to poster. (Pretty sure I should have done this years ago.)
Just shipped Ad Engine β a 24/7 AI ad-ops monitoring tool for DTC telehealth brands β in 7 focused days for the H0 hackathon. The build had teeth because there was a real reason for it: on February 14 this year, Meta enforced new health-data restrictions that killed pixel-based conversion tracking for the entire DTC telehealth space. At 11 PM the day it happened, I watched a single ad set at Bliss Health burn $4,200 with no alert. The tool I wanted didn't exist, so I built it.
The stack
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless v2 (us-east-2, 0.5β1.0 ACU)
Next.js 16 β App Router, Server Components, Server Actions
Vercel Fluid Compute + Cron β 15-min polling cadence on Meta + Google APIs
Claude Sonnet 4.6 with schema-enforced structured output via Zod + AI SDK Output.object()
Drizzle ORM with postgres-js driver
What I'd love your thoughts on
The juiciest engineering decision was rejecting DynamoDB for Aurora Serverless v2. The workload turned out to be multi-entity joins + time-series windowing for 7-day baselines, and DynamoDB's GSI-design tax made that worse than a relational engine's OVER ROWS BETWEEN 336 PRECEDING window function.
Wrote the full decision matrix + schema + SQL + the postgres-js Fluid Compute connection-pool pattern prepare: false, max: 1) here:
β Read the full decision matrix here
Three questions for the community β and I'd genuinely love feedback:
For 24/7 polling workloads with bursty Claude diagnosis calls β would you reach for Vercel Fluid Compute or stand up a separate worker? Curious about the threshold where the answer flips.
Anyone hit the postgres-js prepare: false + max: 1 Fluid Compute pattern? Worked great for my scale (1 cluster, ~96 polls/day). Curious if anyone has stress-tested it past that.
What would you have built differently in a 7-day sprint targeting this kind of operational-monitoring shape? Open to the roast.
Live: https://runadengine.com
2-min walkthrough: https://youtu.be/poFYDHB9WyU
Happy to be here. π
