Axelot

Most collaborative editors either lock you into one vendor or break the moment two people type at once. Axelot does the hard version: many writers editing the same technical document at the same time, conflict-free, with live presence.

A TipTap rich-text editor is bound to a Yjs CRDT so concurrent edits converge on their own. Documents sync directly between browsers over a WebRTC peer mesh, with Firestore holding durable snapshots and metadata, keeping live editing fast while still persisting state.

The hard part is the seams. NextAuth handles Google, GitHub, and bcrypt-hashed email/password sign-in with Zod validation and enforced email verification, then mints a Firebase custom token server-side into the session so the browser can talk to Firestore securely. A trending feed blends logarithmic view scaling with recency and activity decay, recomputed by a CRON_SECRET-protected Vercel cron job that prioritizes active documents. AI editing actions stream completions through an OpenRouter proxy.

The result is a production-deployed platform that ships as a multi-stage Docker image. Axelot was a collaborative two-person build, and I owned core parts of the system end to end.