“For a small team, branching and scale-to-zero just make our lives markedly easier. We’re able to use real data without risky scripts touching production, and we don’t pay overnight for what we don’t use.”
— Ryan McHenry, Head of Technology, Sharing Excess

What is Sharing Excess?

In the United States, nearly 40% of food goes to waste while 47 million Americans go hungry. Sharing Excess is a nonprofit food-rescue organization that redirects surplus food from retailers, wholesale markets, and farms to community hunger relief organizations. Their mission is to build a more sustainable and equitable food system that helps reduce waste and feed communities.

The work is a real-time logistics challenge. Perishable cargo, often in pallets and truckloads, must be split and routed daily across a network of 1,800+ vendors. For example, 30 bins of watermelons (weighing thousands of pounds) from a single pickup must be distributed to multiple partners because no single site can absorb it all. Accuracy and speed are everything.

Engineering at Sharing Excess: Team, Stack and Workflow

Sharing Excess runs a deliberately lean engineering organization: a three-person core team ( engineers and analysts) led by Head of Technology Ryan McHenry, with additional support from co-op interns and community volunteers. The team maintains guardrails like point-in-time restore (PITR) and daily pg_dump backups while focusing most cycles on shipping products.

Language: Typescript (front + backend)
Repos & apps: Monorepo structure using Bun Workspaces with separate client and server apps, as well as packages for db, types/schemas, ui
Frontend: React 18, built with Vite + VitePWA (installable/offline); Chakra UI; Clerk for auth; Tanstack Query, Form + Store, Mapbox, deployed on Railway
Backend: Bun/TypeScript with a Hono API
Database: Postgres on Neon with Drizzle ORM (schema & connection management)
Auth: Clerk
Typing/Validation: Zod
Tooling/Visualization: Retool (external data visualizations)
Analytics + Error Management: Sentry, Mixpanel, APITally
AI + LLM Services: Anthropic
Infrastructure/Hosting: Dockerized setup on Railway

Platform Architecture

Sharing Excess’s platform consists of data systems, services, and web/mobile clients that coordinate food rescue nationwide, 24/7. Each environment (production, staging, and per-developer) connects to its corresponding Neon branch for predictable end-to-end behavior. Learn more about it here.

Why Sharing Excess Migrated to Neon

After outgrowing Firebase’s NoSQL model, Sharing Excess needed more powerful querying, realistic dev/test environments, and simpler operations. Here’s what Sharing Excess had to say about their switch to Neon:

Unopinionated, low-maintenance Postgres. Neon lets Sharing Excess choose their app layer (Hono, Drizzle, Clerk) while Neon manages the database. Industry standard PostgreSQL makes interoperability with additional tools + services easy and thoughtless.
Environment parity with branch-per-environment. Each application environment (per team member development branches, staging, production) connects to its matching database branch, so staging and development mirror production without reconfiguration.
Realistic testing and safe collaboration with production-like, anonymized data. Branches reset from production and run through on-demand anonymization for easy access in local development.
Operational rigor without toil via built-in guardrails. PITR and history, plus daily pg_dump backups, keep confidence high and data-loss risk mitigated.
Spend aligned to usage with scale-to-zero. Idle branches scale down outside operating hours, cutting costs and allow the team to optimize their workflows, not their invoices.

Database Branching Workflow

“The feature that will truly keep me attached to Neon is branching. We can reset from the parent branch at any point, which lets us work with up-to-date data as we develop new features . When you’re working in a real-time logistics environment, that makes all the difference in catching bugs before they ship.”
— Ryan McHenry, Head of Technology, Sharing Excess

Neon branching reshapes Sharing Excess’s development workflow in three key ways:

Dev/Test with realistic environments
Clean, automated release flow branching
Create production-like data with anonymization

Dev/Test with Realistic Environments

Neon branching enables a production branch, a staging branch, and individual child branches for each active developer. Everyone works with up-to-date, production-like data, which prevents bugs and keeps test behavior close to production.

Clean, Automated Release Flow Branching

Branching also significantly lowers operational overhead. GitHub feature → staging → production merges map one-to-one to Neon branches and environments. Each stage connects to the correct database without manual reconfiguration, reducing deployment mistakes and shortening the path from code merge to realistic integration testing.

Create Production-like Data with Anonymization

Sharing Excess combines Neon branching with an in-house anonymization process, enabling safe sharing with external collaborators while protecting sensitive data.

“Neon branching is game-changing for how we work. Our workflow is built around clean, simple, and well-synchronized production, staging, and development branches. Neon branching makes it just so much simpler to manage our devops without writing complicated scripts or risking production data.”
— Ryan McHenry, Head of Technology, Sharing Excess

Neon Cuts Development Time and Costs for Small Teams

Neon helps Sharing Excess focus their operational effort where it matters most. With a branch-per-environment Postgres workflow, PITR, and managed scaling, the team spends less time on routine database maintenance without compromising operational standards. Developers test against up-to-date, production-like datasets and safely share anonymized copies with collaborators. And because scale-to-zero reduces idle costs, more of every dollar goes to rescuing perishable food.

You can learn more about Sharing Excess’s mission and their amazing projects on their website. Should it resonate with you, consider supporting Sharing Excess by donating or volunteering.

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