I’ve had exactly one catastrophic deployment failure in my career. Just one. But that single Friday afternoon disaster taught me more about deployment processes than a thousand successful pushes ever could. It was a Magento e-commerce site, back in the days when we used SVN for version control (yes, I’m showing my age here). We had a proper setup with separate staging and production...
You know the moment. You’re in a groove writing code, and Slack pings: “The checkout thing glitched out again.” You ask what happened, but the reply is either silence or “I don’t know, it just doesn’t work.” That’s the reality of most bug reports. They often land in one of a few predictable shapes: The Vague Reporter: “The app is being weird.” No specifics, no details. The Screenshot Bomber: A...
You spend months architecting the perfect system, setting up pristine models, writing elegant code, and documenting every endpoint. You finally ship it out into the world… and then your users show up and do whatever they want with it. Suddenly, the product you thought was yours becomes something else entirely. Spoiler: it’s their product now, and you’re just along for the ride. Developers Build...
I published my first freelancing guide the traditional way—through Amazon KDP. It worked fine, but I kept thinking there had to be a better approach. Then I came across how Pieter Levels handles his product sales, and it got me thinking differently about the whole process. What I Learned from Round One Publishing on Amazon feels like the obvious choice. Everyone knows it, people trust it, and the...
I had a meeting recently with someone who was hesitant to sign up for my SaaS. He needed all the features my platform offers, but he was tossing around the idea of building a stripped-down standalone version instead. That’s when I laid out the reality check. Even if he went standalone, he’d still be on the hook for monthly hosting fees. Anything connected to the internet costs something to keep...
Most people think world-class service is about fast response times, flawless communication, or throwing in extra perks to “wow” customers. While those things are nice, they aren’t the heart of true service. World-class service is about ensuring your customer’s success—even when it means telling them no. I’ve been a self-employed software developer for over a decade, writing LAMP stack...
I’ve decided to switch it up both visually and from a tech perspective. I’m back to using WordPress from using Gatsby. No real reason other than I’ve started offering more WordPress hosting and want to eat my own dog food.
There’s still a lot of talk about vibe coding. I’ve written about it before, but after watching the Cursor and Claude drama on Twitter, I realized my approach might not match the noise. Programming languages are like spoken languages. There are infinite ways to say or build something, but only a handful of those ways are worth using long-term. Anyone can hack together a feature, but there’s a big...
When I started building this SaaS in September, I didn’t even want to launch a SaaS. I was working with a local client who had a tight budget and was using a mess of disconnected services that refused to talk to each other. None of them offered a usable API. I realized the only way to get them what they needed was to build something myself. That was the spark. Writing Code Was Less Than 40% of...
Who’s running your app — your server, your client, or a silent third party you forgot you even wired in? As I’ve been revamping the API layer for ManageMemberships, I’ve started seeing how layered and political “state” really is. You’ve got tokens, hashes, cookies, headers, and sometimes ghosts from past refactors — all arguing over who gets to say what’s true. This post breaks down some of...