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.
Our pickers and packers work on cheap tablets with a Bluetooth scanner, on the same web application the office uses — same URL, same codebase, no app store. How a browser tells a barcode from a person typing, what the server does with a scan (match → location → pick, in one round‑trip), and why "it feels like an app" is a design discipline, not a framework.
One warehouse wanted a fingerprint reader, another wanted to scan a QR with their own phone, the office wanted a PIN on a tablet, and a visiting colleague wanted to clock in wherever they happened to be. How the clocking system grew eight machine types by listening to managers, and the two quiet rules — order the timestamps, find the right employment — that keep the timesheets honest underneath all of them.
A live chat on every storefront, answered from the staff app by agents who see the customer's account, orders and history beside the conversation; messages translated both ways; a session that can become a ticket, a Slack thread or a summary; presence and typing over WebSockets; a dashboard of who is on the site right now and from where. And the tone rules we wrote down when an assistant started drafting replies.