Notes on engineering leadership, platform architecture, and integrations at scale — from a fractional CTO and advisor.https://amitsolanki.com/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/mcp-oauth-rails-production/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/mcp-oauth-rails-production/A real remote MCP server on Rails needs OAuth 2.1, three RFCs, and a healthy distrust of defaults. The failures were in Doorkeeper's silent defaults, the MCP gem's transport, and a generated fix that was stricter than the spec it implemented.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://amitsolanki.com/writing/spree-menu-chat-rag-assistant/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/spree-menu-chat-rag-assistant/spree_menu_chat is a read-only RAG assistant grounded in a Spree store's real, synced menu and policies — Gemini, Voyage embeddings, and pgvector, with the read-only guardrail enforced structurally, not just prompted. A \r\n-vs-\n parsing bug silently broke every streamed answer behind a fully green spec suite, and even after that was fixed, the assistant still couldn't handle a plain "hi."Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://amitsolanki.com/writing/doordash-drive-delivery-dispatch-spree/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/doordash-drive-delivery-dispatch-spree/spree_doordash adds live-quoted, auto-dispatched DoorDash Drive delivery to the Spree + Square restaurant platform. Two real bugs — a phone number format DoorDash silently rejects, and an event subscriber that was never actually wired up — only surfaced once a real storefront checkout was driven through, not the 87-example spec suite that kept passing regardless.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://amitsolanki.com/writing/open-sourcing-spree-square-gem/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/open-sourcing-spree-square-gem/spree_square started as one restaurant's Square integration. Here's why it made sense to release it as open source, what it actually took to ship it responsibly — a full commit-history security review, closing test-coverage gaps first — and the bug the first real release caught within days.Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://amitsolanki.com/writing/spree-square-restaurant-platform/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/spree-square-restaurant-platform/Why Square — not a second admin UI — is the source of truth for the menu in a Spree Commerce restaurant platform: the architecture that fell out of that call, a payment trick that never touches Square's card APIs, and two webhook quirks that only showed up against a live sandbox.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://amitsolanki.com/writing/whatsapp-catalog-cart-field-guide/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/whatsapp-catalog-cart-field-guide/What it actually takes to get a Rails app talking to WhatsApp's Cloud API with real Catalog and Cart support — eight undocumented walls, in the order I hit them, and the checklist that would have saved me a day.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://amitsolanki.com/writing/mcp-server-spree-commerce/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/mcp-server-spree-commerce/A hands-on log of building an MCP server against a real Spree Commerce store seeded with 100,000 real historical orders — a silent data-loss bug from a fast insert path, a join fan-out that made my own analytics lie by 42x, and standing up full spec-compliant OAuth 2.1 instead of skipping auth for a quick test.Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://amitsolanki.com/writing/voice-ai-restaurant-receptionist/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/voice-ai-restaurant-receptionist/A hands-on log of building a voice AI phone agent for restaurant ordering with no prior voice-AI background — the architecture bet that paid off, a toolchain bug with zero AI glamour, and the moment a confidently wrong AI got caught by a boring safeguard.Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://amitsolanki.com/writing/api-integration-checklist/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/api-integration-checklist/10 lessons on idempotency, webhooks, auth, and observability from 200+ production API integrations — and the checklist that came out of learning them the hard way.Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://amitsolanki.com/writing/open-for-fractional-work/https://amitsolanki.com/writing/open-for-fractional-work/After two decades building platforms and teams — WeWork's hyper-growth years, then eight years scaling a restaurant-integrations organization to 20,000+ live locations — I'm opening a small fractional CTO and advisory practice.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT