Synapse Commerce
A multi-organisation commerce platform over Shopify's GraphQL API: product and inventory sync, purchase orders, Excel pipelines and POS — running two storefronts in production.
- 2
- storefronts, one platform
- 100+
- releases shipped
- 0
- builds run on the production box
- Python
- FastAPI
- PostgreSQL
- Shopify GraphQL
- React
- Docker
- GitHub Actions
The problem
A parts retailer's catalogue, stock and purchasing lived in Shopify, spreadsheets and people's heads at the same time. Staff needed one place to look up stock, raise purchase orders and keep two storefronts from drifting apart.
My role
Architect and lead developer — backend, frontend, deployment pipeline and the operational guardrails.
What I built
- 01
An org-scoped backend so two businesses share one deployment without ever seeing each other's data.
- 02
Background sync workers and schedulers against Shopify's GraphQL API, with an Excel service for the bulk work the staff already did in spreadsheets.
- 03
Purchase orders, inventory lookups and POS flows in a React frontend built for people working at a counter.
- 04
A deployment pipeline that builds the bundle on CI and copies it in — the production VPS is shared and chronically loaded, so building on it took the shop down.
- 05
Operational guardrails after real incidents: SQL echo kept off and container logs truncated on a cron, because gigabytes of log an hour filled the disk and turned into 500s on login.
Outcome
Still the system the business runs on daily, releasing continuously with a versioned changelog.
Stock lookups that used to be a phone call are now a search box — and a read-only API other tools query.