Gardenia Aromas

The problem it solves

A business selling through direct messages loses after-hours sales and spends the day repeating the same price and stock answers. With no catalogue of its own there's no cart, no payment and no history.

What it does

A store with catalogue, cart, customer accounts, payments and an admin dashboard to manage products and orders.

The hard part

The catalogue weighs more than the code

A physical-product store lives on photos, and photos change the infrastructure equation: a backup stops being a thirty-kilobyte file and becomes gigabytes repeated across every copy. That's why this project isn't deployed yet — the backup strategy that works for the other two applications doesn't scale to this one, and deploying before solving that would be knowingly creating a production problem.

Technical decisions

• Postponing the deploymentinstead ofshipping it and solving backups later

  Because Shipping a store with real orders and no backup strategy that handles its volume is accepting a future data loss. The launch date is negotiable; that isn't.

What I learned

That sometimes the right infrastructure decision is not to deploy yet.

What's next

Solving incremental image backup before putting it on the server.

In short

• Catalogue, cart, accounts, payments and dashboard