Engineering guides
The things we had to learn to build FlightByte, written down for the next person: how a flight-status integration is actually put together, what the naive version costs, and the edge cases that only show up with a customer attached.
- [ September 21, 2026 · 5 min read ]
Flight status push notifications: one webhook, every device on the flight
How a travel app turns one signed webhook into the right push on every phone that cares. The table that maps flights to devices, a receiver that answers fast and sends later, copy per change type, collapse keys so a new gate replaces the old one, quiet rules, and driving an iOS Live Activity from the same event.
Read the guide - [ September 21, 2026 · 6 min read ]
From a booking email to a watched flight: lookup, legs, codeshares
An itinerary app starts with whatever a confirmation email said. How to turn that into a flight record you can trust and a subscription you pay for once: what to parse, when a lookup can confirm it, how to pick the leg, how to stop two codeshare numbers becoming two watches, and when to subscribe.
Read the guide - [ September 21, 2026 · 6 min read ]
Missed connection alerts from two subscriptions
A tight connection is not a property of either flight; it lives in the gap between them. How to compute that gap from two watched flights, choose a threshold per airport, handle terminals, early departures, cancellations and diversions, and keep the alert from firing every time an estimate moves by a minute.
Read the guide - [ September 12, 2026 · 5 min read ]
Building a flight delay notification system
What "delayed" means in the data, who needs to hear it and when, the rules that keep a notifier quiet until it matters, a working Node reference with hysteresis, and the edge cases that show up in the first month.
Read the guide - [ September 12, 2026 · 6 min read ]
Flight landed notification in 20 minutes with Node.js
A Node service that watches a passenger's flight and messages the driver when it lands, when it reaches the gate and when the bags come out. No polling loop, no cron, no dependencies.
Read the guide - [ September 12, 2026 · 5 min read ]
TK1 flies twice a day: the flight number ambiguity nobody documents
A flight number is not a flight. Some numbers operate two legs on one date, most APIs hand you both and let you guess, and the guess is silent. What the ambiguity looks like in the data, how FlightByte refuses to guess, and the three lines of code that handle it.
Read the guide - [ September 12, 2026 · 4 min read ]
Flight status codes explained: S, A, L, C, D, R and what phase they map to
The letter codes that airline status feeds use, what each one hides, how FlightByte turns them into a phase you can branch on, and how the same moments are named by aviationstack, AeroDataBox and AeroAPI.
Read the guide - [ September 12, 2026 · 8 min read ]
How adaptive polling works: 3 minutes at the gate, 12 hours a week out
The function that decides when FlightByte next asks about a flight, as it runs in production. Why the phase decides after departure and the clock before it, what a flight costs in polls, and the safety nets around the queue.
Read the guide - [ September 12, 2026 · 6 min read ]
Verifying webhook signatures the right way: raw body, timing-safe compare, replay window
A webhook is an unauthenticated POST from the internet. The signature is what makes it yours. The three ways verifiers go wrong, working code for seven frameworks, how to rotate a secret without dropping a delivery, and a checklist.
Read the guide - [ September 12, 2026 · 6 min read ]
Why polling a flight API costs more than you think
The loop every flight integration starts with, the five costs hiding in it, the arithmetic for 500 flights a month on request-priced APIs, and when polling is still the right call.
Read the guide
Read enough. Watch a flight.
Nine dollars, a hundred flights, every event, signed. The quickstart is the first guide with the words taken out.
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