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.
Eight years of sent email — 245 million rows, 217 GB, never pruned — was slowing down a daily rollup and bloating every developer's copy of the database. How we moved it to an archive server in verified batches, why the retention window is 90 days and not 60, and the one trick that keeps historical stats correct after the rows are gone.
Fifty‑five kinds of email, one pipeline. How a newsletter to a hundred thousand people is prepared, sent through Amazon SES from a queue, tracked back event by event through SNS webhooks — delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained — attributed to the order it caused, and kept from becoming the retry storm that once throttled us at 1,700 calls a second.