OnceHeld

The Problem

Musicians, artists, and estates manage thousands of physical items with no proper tooling. Spreadsheets lose provenance. Generic tools can't handle complex relationships. Legacy archive systems are stuck in the 90s.

The Solution

I built OnceHeld as a specialized platform around their domain: provenance chains, condition histories, multi-facility tracking, and valuation audits.

Key Results

• Provenance as First-Class Entity - Ownership chains with acquisition methods, custody transfers
• Time-Travel Queries - Reconstruct any item's state at any point in history
• Flexible Schema - Type-specific metadata without schema migrations
• Multi-Location Tracking - Items move between facilities with full movement history

Technical Approach

Provenance modeling with bidirectional relationships - items can be split, merged, or grouped. Audit-ready documentation for authentication.

Time-travel queries via trigger-based change capture to separate history table. Field-level tracking required for insurance claims and legal disputes.

Flexible schema design using JSON-based custom fields searchable across all field types. PostgreSQL full-text search with GIN indexes over Elasticsearch complexity.

Auth via NextAuth with magic links - estates have non-technical users who need frictionless access.

This project demonstrates my approach to complex domain problems: not every problem is CRUD. Some need careful entity design, enterprise patterns, and technical pragmatism.