Short write‑ups of problems we hit running a real commerce operation and what we changed in the code because of them. No product announcements; just the reasoning.
A warehouse cannot stop for a deploy, and neither can we. How a nineteen-person team ships a monolith with six thousand actions to production seventeen times a week — the pipeline, the tests that gate it, the deploy that never cuts the branch it sits on, and why AI agents made the cadence faster without making it looser.
3,300 tests against a real PostgreSQL with 800 tables, restored from a dump before every file, run in parallel on ten processes in CI and by a dozen people and their AI agents at once locally — without stepping on each other. No mocks of the schema, no synthetic repositories. How the TEST_TOKEN trick makes that possible, and the four ways such a suite goes flaky.
Twenty‑nine steps between "push to production" and "the warehouse is on the new code", and not one of them makes a picker wait. A walk through one deploy as it actually runs — releases and symlinks, caches, migrations on one host only, a front‑end build that is skipped when nothing changed, checksums that decide what to flush, queues told to finish, workers reloaded from an anchor, SSR restarted only if it must, a broadcast that tells open tabs to refresh, and a few chores at the end.