THE JOURNAL
Notes on building, shipping & securing the web.
DevOps · 5 min
How we get a CI pipeline under ten minutes
Slow pipelines quietly tax every change. The caching, parallelism and test-splitting steps we use to bring CI from forty minutes to under ten.
Leo Tanaka · Mar 14, 2025
E-commerce · 5 min
WooCommerce, Shopify or headless for a mid-size store
Platform choice for a store doing one to twenty million a year comes down to ownership, operations and team shape. A practical comparison.
Maya Okafor · Mar 12, 2025
Shopify · 5 min
Setting up Shopify Markets for real international selling
Currencies, domains, duties and translated content: the decisions that make cross-border stores convert instead of confuse.
Sofia Lindqvist · Mar 11, 2025
Security · 5 min
How we vet a WordPress plugin before it reaches production
Plugins are the largest attack surface on most WordPress sites. This is the review we run before any new one is installed.
Maya Okafor · Mar 11, 2025
WordPress · 5 min
Building Gutenberg blocks that editors cannot break
Constrained controls, sensible defaults, locking and validation: how we design custom blocks that keep the brand intact after handover.
Maya Okafor · Mar 05, 2025
Engineering · 5 min
Write the API contract before the front end exists
Agreeing on an API contract up front lets front-end and back-end teams work in parallel. How we write, review and enforce contracts on client projects.
Maya Okafor · Feb 12, 2025
Performance · 5 min
Setting performance budgets that survive the next redesign
Most speed gains erode within a year. Budgets enforced in CI and tied to business metrics are how we keep them.
Ravi Iyer · Feb 11, 2025
Design · 5 min
Starting a design system with tokens, not components
Design systems often stall because they start with a component library. Starting with tokens brings consistency sooner and a foundation that survives rebrands.
Nadia Haddad · Feb 11, 2025
SEO · 5 min
The SEO-safe website migration checklist we use on every relaunch
Most traffic losses after a relaunch are preventable. The redirect mapping, pre-launch checks and first-month monitoring we run every time.
Ravi Iyer · Feb 11, 2025
WordPress · 5 min
How we vet a WordPress plugin before it goes on a client site
The review process we run on every third-party plugin, from maintenance signals to code checks, and when we write our own instead.
Maya Okafor · Jan 22, 2025
One email a month. Only the good stuff.
Field notes from real client projects. No spam.