Buildkite recently undertook a significant update to its emoji support, transitioning from a custom infrastructure to leveraging native device capabilities and Unicode standards. This update, driven by new releases like Unicode 9.0 and Emoji 4.0, initially faced challenges due to the complexity of handling numerous new emoji and sequences, which led to performance issues and a temporary rollback. Through collaborative efforts, the team optimized their systems by refining the emoji parser and utilizing tools like emoji-regex, ultimately improving performance and reducing server load. This shift allowed Buildkite to simplify both front- and back-end emoji processing, reduce data sent to clients, and align with how modern browsers render emojis. The experience provided valuable insights into Unicode, JavaScript, and Ruby handling of emoji, and emphasized the advantages of relying on device-native emoji rendering, which led to a more streamlined and efficient system.