Journal
Notes from actual projects
Written when something turned out to be worth writing down — a measurement that surprised me, a default that was wrong, a decision that took an argument. Everything here comes from work that shipped.
What this journal is
I build websites, booking and quoting systems for car rental and auto services, construction and home services, and the build side for design studios — mostly on WordPress, sometimes not, depending on what the problem needs. This is where I write down the things that turned out to be worth writing down.
That means no listicles and no predictions. Each article starts from something specific: a number I measured, a default that was quietly wrong, a decision that had a real trade-off on both sides. Where I got something wrong, that is in the article too, because the mistake is usually the useful part.
What it covers
Five topics, and they map to the parts of a project where money is actually won or lost.
- Performance — what makes a site slow on a real phone rather than on a developer laptop — compression, caching, third-party scripts, and how to read a performance audit without being fooled by it.
- Security — the defaults that leak information, the checks that take thirty seconds, and the failures that only show up months after launch.
- Architecture — content modelling, multilingual structure, and the decision of whether a site needs a content management system at all.
- Business — the parts of a web project that are commercial rather than technical — publishing prices, the cost of an admin interface nobody designed, who owns a dependency after handover.
- WordPress — specific behaviour that wastes hours and looks like incompetence from both sides.
If something here matches a problem you have, the same thinking is visible in the work, and the fastest way to get a straight answer about your own case is to describe it in writing.