E-commerce Platform API (Leading Iraqi Market)
Leading Iraqi e-commerce platform serving tens of thousands of customers through a mobile application for buyers and a separate application for sellers. The system handles the full e-commerce lifecycle — product management, cart and order processing, multi-seller order splitting, warehouse assembly, last-mile delivery, and financial tracking — all through a single backend API. By the time it reached 50,000+ customers, it was one of the more serious production systems in the Iraqi market.
I was one of the core backend developers on this project, and the most experienced on the team by the time I left.
// the-challenge
The hardest part of this project was not technical — it was contextual. I joined mid-project. The system was already live, already serving thousands of customers, and already carrying the full weight of a production e-commerce platform. There was no onboarding period. There was no time to slowly get familiar. I had to understand a large, complex codebase, learn the full business flow — how orders moved between customers, sellers, the warehouse, and drivers — and start contributing meaningfully, all at the same time.
Joining a live production system at scale is a completely different experience from building something from scratch. Every decision carries real consequences. A wrong query hits a real database. A missed edge case breaks a real order for a real customer. That reality sharpens you quickly.
// the-solution
I immersed myself in the codebase and the business logic until both made sense. Once I had full context I started contributing across the core system — order lifecycle management, multi-seller workflows, driver assignment flows, and financial transaction handling. The project also had a full ERP integration for financial management which added another layer of complexity to understand and work within.
As my understanding of the system deepened I naturally took on more. I became the go-to person for architectural decisions on the backend, and eventually started coordinating the other backend developers — distributing tasks and overseeing the technical direction of the project.
On the infrastructure side I took partial ownership of the deployment setup. This meant choosing the right Hostinger VPS plan for the load, deploying and managing the API across two servers, and configuring Cloudflare as both a CDN and WAF to protect the API from external threats. To ensure high availability I set up an active-standby load balancer through Cloudflare — so if one server went down, traffic would automatically shift to the other without the platform going dark. I also implemented Redis caching to keep the API performant under the load of a growing user base.
// the-outcome
The API served over 50,000 customers in production. That number means something when you're the one keeping it running — handling incidents, diagnosing issues under pressure, and making sure a live platform stays stable for a significant user base. This project taught me what production really means. Not deploying code and moving on, but owning a live system and being accountable for what happens when things go wrong.
It also taught me how to walk into complexity mid-flight, find your footing fast, and add value without breaking what's already working. That skill — fitting into large existing systems — is one of the most underrated things a developer can learn, and Bakeet is where I learned it.