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.
226,000 images — product photos, family banners, logos, pallet photos, chat attachments — stored once and never resized by us. Every image on every page is a signed URL to an image proxy that resizes, crops and converts on the fly: AVIF and WebP with a fallback, a retina variant of each, the right width for the slot, cached at the edge. Why a proxy beat pre‑generated thumbnails, how the signature stops the proxy being a free resizer for the internet, and the "picture" element every card uses.