Notes from twenty-plus years of shipping things.
Short essays and field notes — what we've learned about white-label engineering, AI in production (what works inside the studio, what we'd ship to a client), the boring craft of WordPress, and what actually breaks at 2 a.m. Published when there's something worth writing down. Not on a schedule.
The pre-handoff gate we should have had on day one
Every build we handed off had a handful of small, embarrassing mistakes that the agency caught in their QA. Not architectural problems — the kind that a fresh pair of eyes finds in ten minutes. We…
Read the essayLong-form: process, craft, opinions.
Why we started syncing with the agency team
We ran a fully asynchronous partnership for the first eighteen months. Tickets, chat threads, workbook comments. It worked — until it didn't. What fixed…
The first year was chaos. Then we wrote it down.
Ten projects in, our team was building the same agency's sites in three different ways. Different page builders. Different form plugins. Different conventions for…
Short-form: things we've noticed lately.
Not essays. Single observations from active projects — what surprised us, what broke, what we're changing about how we work. Two-minute reads, written in the moment.
When scope arrives after the build has started
Mid-build scope changes are not unusual. The failure mode is not the change itself—it is handling it informally, inside an estimate that was never sized for it.
Draft-first is not a courtesy
Two separate incidents—one on a law firm homepage, one on a dental redesign—converged into a single non-negotiable: for sensitive-industry clients, draft-first delivery is not a politeness. It is the only…