The brief.

Vroom started as a business proposal for a peer-to-peer rental marketplace where car owners list idle vehicles for renters to book, Turo-style, aimed at travelers and remote workers.

From that vision I scoped and built the core rental engine: the parts that had to be solid before any marketplace layer made sense: accounts, vehicle inventory, and bookings.

Architecture.

Server-rendered with Express and EJS layouts, so pages are assembled on the server rather than shipped as a client bundle. Authentication runs on express-session with bcrypt-hashed passwords.

The data layer is MariaDB accessed through the native driver. I wrote the schema and every query by hand instead of reaching for an ORM, because I wanted to understand exactly what each query did rather than trust an abstraction to do it for me. Configuration lives in environment variables, requests are logged with Morgan, and it's deployed on Vercel.

The interesting problems.

• Authentication, done properly. Session-based login with bcrypt password hashing means no plaintext and no shortcuts. Getting the session lifecycle and password handling right is unglamorous, but it has to be correct.
• Modeling the data by hand. Users, vehicles, and bookings are related tables joined with SQL I wrote myself. It is a from-scratch relational model rather than an ORM-generated one.
• Server-rendered, on purpose. Choosing EJS and server rendering over a client framework kept the app simple and fast for what it needed to do: the right tool for the scope, not the flashiest one.
• Booking and availability. The platform establishes the booking model around users, vehicles, and rental dates. The next hardening step is date-range conflict handling so the same car cannot be double-booked.

What I'd build next.

The proposal imagined a revenue-generating marketplace; the shipped app is the core engine without payments or the owner-listing side. The honest roadmap is a payment flow to realize the marketplace vision, peer-to-peer listing features that let owners put their own cars up, and availability-conflict handling for overlapping booking dates.