2 years ago my company decided to go headless with our ecommerce stack. I was excited about it, decoupled architecture, pick your own frontend framework, freedom to build exactly what the business needs, and I was on the evaluation committee so I championed it hard.

Now I maintain cart persistence, checkout flow, URL routing, 301 redirects, structured data, meta tags, OG tags, sitemap generation, search indexing, performance monitoring, and error handling for roughly 34 third-party integrations that can each independently decide to throw a 500 at 2am on a Saturday.

I built the image optimization pipeline, the caching layer and the fallback logic for when our payments provider goes down during a flash sale and 600 people are mid-checkout…

I am the platform now.

Nobody outside engineering has any idea. Product thinks the site just works the way it used to on our old monolith, marketing files a ticket asking why their new landing page doesn't have the right OG image and I want to explain that OG tags don't just happen anymore, that I wrote that system, that it breaks when they use non-standard characters in their campaign UTMs, that there is no magic layer handling this, it's just me.

But I close the ticket and fix it in 10 minutes because that's faster than the conversation.

I mass-transferred an entire platform's responsibilities onto my own calendar and called it engineering excellence.

Anyway it's late, I should probably go check if the CDN cache purge cron is still running.