Date: 09/02
What I did
Today I focused on tightening my understanding and control of the Retails API as a standalone system, not as a sidecar of other services.
The main concrete task was small but deliberate:
renaming a paper type from “Cotton Fibre Smooth” to “Cotton Fibre Velvet” across the entire Retails API.
That required treating the name as a system-wide contract, not just a display string:
- Ensured the change is conceptualized as a rename, not a new option
- Preserved all IDs, relationships, and pricing mappings
- Considered every surface where the name exists:
- product catalog JSON responses
- attribute / attribute option data
- pricing import/export (Excel)
- tests, seeds, and any hardcoded references
- Framed the change so existing consumers continue to work without schema or behavioral breakage
Alongside the task, I explicitly formalized the Retails API mental model:
- It is a product catalog + pricing system
- It owns products, print sizes, attributes, and attribute-option pricing
- It does not own orders, payments, customers, or production flows
This separation matters more than the rename itself.
What I learned
- Naming is part of API stability
- In a pricing-driven system, names are not cosmetic
- A careless rename can silently break pricing imports, staff workflows, or downstream assumptions
- Small changes expose system boundaries
- A simple paper-name update forces you to ask:
- where does truth live?
- who consumes it?
- what must not change?
- If you can’t answer those clearly, the system is already fragile
- A simple paper-name update forces you to ask:
- Retails API must stay boring
- No clever logic
- No hidden side effects
- Predictable JSON, predictable pricing, predictable imports
- That “boring” quality is what makes it safe to depend on
- Being explicit prevents future leakage
- Explicitly separating Retails API from Files, PA, or order systems avoids architectural drift
- Once boundaries blur, cleanup becomes exponentially harder
Takeaway
Today wasn’t about adding features.
It was about respecting the Retails API as a source of truth.
A clean rename, done carefully, is a signal that the system is being treated seriously.
That discipline compounds over time — especially in catalog and pricing systems.