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.
Every storefront page is rendered once on the server — so crawlers and slow phones get full HTML — and once more in the browser, where it becomes an app. How Inertia server‑side rendering runs here (a Bun process under a supervisor, health‑checked on every deploy), what a 418 KB props payload taught us about where the second actually goes, the silent client‑side‑rendering incident, and the three levers we keep on the list.
Why a trading company wrote its own CMS instead of bolting a shop onto a page builder, and how two front‑end engineers turned "we need a product page" into seventy‑odd web blocks, a workshop that edits the live site, snapshots you can publish and roll back, and a storefront that knows its own catalogue.