October 20, 2026 · In Mercadito
A bookings reel without a real patient
Showing bookings in a reel needed a clinic with a full agenda. The only one in the database was real, with a home address and a person's phone number. It was recorded on a Mercadito that doesn't exist.
Mercadito's reels are recorded on the real site, with a headless Chrome that answers locally every request that isn't a read, so that no view and no order counts in the pilot. That works for showing real businesses' menus. It doesn't work for showing the bookings module: the test business that had services and an agenda is a real hair salon, and its listing carries a home address and a phone number. A public video with that doesn't get published.
The way out was to bring up a whole Mercadito on the recording machine: its own Postgres on another port, the development server pointing at it, and every production-key variable (Facebook, Stripe, notifications, storage) set to blank. That detail matters: an empty variable in the environment beats the .env file, so that local server can't post, charge or notify anyone even if something tries.
On top of it we seeded «Tu Consultorio Dental», which doesn't exist: five services, six products with purpose-made images, opening hours and a day's agenda with made-up patients. Even that had useful snags. The menu only renders images with a web address, not embedded ones, and its security policy only allows https: the test images ended up on a separate static server with the policy switched off for that one take. And the menu-views table is append-only locally too, so the test business can't be deleted and re-seeded: it gets updated in place.
The reel has three takes: a patient booking as a guest, the dentist seeing the appointment in her agenda and confirming it with one tap, and the menu with its products. The phone numbers, fake as they are, come out blurred: the recorder notes the box of every number on every frame and the edit blurs it. The caption says it's an example clinic. And the local server is shut down when it's over: a database like that lives exactly as long as the recording.