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Case Study: Shipping a Hot‑Path Cat Door Feature in 48 Hours — Engineering Playbook

UUnknown

2026-01-03

9 min read

A behind-the-scenes engineering case study: how we shipped a minimal but critical cat door automation feature in 48 hours without breaking existing installs.

Case Study: Shipping a Hot‑Path Cat Door Feature in 48 Hours — Engineering Playbook

Hook: Rapid shipping is an art. In this case study we walk through how a small team delivered a hot-path automation feature for a smart cat door in 48 hours — complete with QA, rollout, and mitigation strategies that protected customers.

Context

A critical ability to remotely lock and unlock a cat door during storms was requested by multiple customers. It was small in scope but high in impact — a perfect candidate for a hot-path release.

Plan: scope, test, ship

Define a minimal specification that covered intermittent network and low-power states.
Create a two-hour test harness replicating edge cases (poor connectivity, battery dropouts).
Ship a staged rollout with tight monitoring and a rollback plan.

Engineering decisions that mattered

Local-first override: The firmware included a local unlock command that worked without cloud access.
Compatibility testing: We used a small matrix of hardware revisions and validated against known interoperability pitfalls — a practice championed by device validation resources.
Edge workflows: We pushed compute-adjacent checks to reduce cloud load and speed up response time.

Rollout & monitoring

We staged the rollout at 5% intervals, watching for regressions and support spikes. Monitoring focused on power state changes, failed unlocks, and OTA health.

Key references and frameworks

Our approach mirrors the playbook in Case Study: Shipping a Hot-Path Feature in 48 Hours, adapted for firmware and hardware nuances.
Edge caching and compute-adjacent strategies improved latency — see Evolution of Edge Caching in 2026 for background on why compute-adjacent architectures help device responsiveness.
For community sites and small infra stories about scaling on free hosts with smart caching, the community case study at Host Free Sites case study is a practical complement to our rollout approach.
And public docs best-practices guided our release notes and runbooks — see Evolution of Public Docs.

Retrospective

The 48‑hour shipment succeeded because scope was minimal, tests were targeted, and compatibility was non-negotiable. The customer feedback loop — fast but careful — prevented a small change from becoming a major regression.

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