Overview
A story for CTOs, tech leads, and the curious engineers who asked, “how did you ship that without fires?”
Oracle NetSuite’s sales reps were losing a chunk of every workday to a painfully slow gifting flow. Our brief was blunt: tighten the entire process until it feels instant, keep costs down, and don’t break security rules. We had six weeks.
Day one: choose the stack
We grabbed an open source UI library, bolted it onto React for the front end, Express for the back, and let Shopify carry the product catalogue. The open-source route spared us license drama and kept the codebase familiar to any future engineer Oracle or Social Imprints might hire. Additionally, open‑source libraries evolve faster than enterprise stacks, which meant we could ship stable code without waiting for a quarterly patch cycle.
Project tech stack we chose
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But open source gave us a surprise. The UI kit offered gorgeous Tailwind markup yet zero ready‑made React components. We kept the markup, rewired the states, and moved on. The trade‑off bought speed without locking anyone into a vendor‑specific framework.
Two problems big enough to derail the schedule
GraphQL meets REST. Shopify splits its data across two APIs. GraphQL covers the shiny new stuff, REST stubbornly clings to legacy endpoints. Neither side could give us every call we needed. We built a lightweight adapter that calls GraphQL when possible, REST when necessary. The switch sits behind a single flag, so future deprecations won’t hurt.
High‑speed dashboards. Reps wanted live numbers on allocations and shipment status. Poor indexing or chatty queries would choke the page. We cached heavy reads, pushed deltas through webhooks, and kept average load times under 200 ms even on end‑of‑quarter spikes.
Self‑healing webhooks: the quiet hero
Shopify loves to drop webhooks without warning. No email, no log, just a missing order update at 3 a.m. We added a heartbeat that pings every ten minutes. If a webhook is missing, the service re‑registers it and back‑fills any lost events. No pager duty, no angry client emails. That single script has run for a year without human help.
Voices from the field
“We want to go back to base principles, and we want to fix the issue, not just temporarily solve the problem.” — Our dev team.
Address checker that pays for itself
Invalid addresses used to cost Social Imprints about a $1000 a week in return fees. We integrated a USPS validator that blocks PO boxes for perishable items and auto‑suggests corrections. Returns fell to near zero, saving roughly six grand a year—more than the validator’s licence by a long shot.
Authentication that doesn’t annoy people
Oracle never opened SSO to us, so we imported every authorized user into Shopify, hid the Shopify UI, and let reps reset passwords or use one‑time codes. When Oracle flips the SSO switch, we swap a middleware and the world keeps turning.
CI/CD that just works
GitHub Actions deploy front‑end and back‑end independently on every push to main. No Jenkins, no manual steps. Staging gets an automatic URL; production deploys need a human click. The flow kept releases boring and let the team cut server size down a notch, saving Social Imprints about $500 a month.
One year later: is it still healthy?
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What we would build next?
Cleaner filters, smarter defaults, AI‑driven product suggestions, and deeper CRM hooks once Oracle opens SSO. All of it fits the existing stack, no rebuilds required.
Takeaways for teams with a four‑week deadline
Use the stable versions of open‑source tools your client’s engineers already know.
Loop in security and compliance during week one, not week four.
Document deprecation calendars (Shopify’s six‑month rhythm saved us panic).
Add self‑recovery to every third‑party integration—you will sleep better.
