The store now knows what you’ve bought before.
The most satisfying ship this week: search results, autocomplete, brand pages, the digital catalog — everywhere a customer browses, items they’ve purchased before now carry a “Previously purchased” badge and rank higher in search.
For an industrial supplier where customers reorder the same parts for years, that’s not a gimmick; it’s the difference between hunting and finding. It took a live order-history endpoint, a search-ranking boost, and chasing down one badge that had been invisible since December because of a single stray line of CSS.
The rest of the week was archaeology and housekeeping.
Archaeology: forty years of invoice history came over from the legacy system, and some of it lied. A field labeled “tax” that actually stored the goods amount. Split bank transactions that rendered as duplicate zero-dollar payment rows. Credit memos that imported looking exactly like regular invoices. Each one took detective work against real records before the fix was obvious — the migration lesson that keeps repeating: the old data always means something, just not what the column name says.
Housekeeping: a request to shrink some buttons by 20% uncovered three separate, conflicting button systems that had accumulated across modules — which one won depended on load order. Rather than nudge pixels blind, I built a visual spec-picker, chose one canonical standard, and consolidated everything into a single stylesheet. Also this week: an audit trail added to the fields humans actually edit, a deploy gate that now fails loudly when the server is running stale code, and the review packet for the AI enrichment pilot printed and headed to our resident domain expert — whose verdict on those fifty items decides whether that machine gets to keep running.