THE JOURNAL
Notes on building, shipping & securing the web.
Shopify · 5 min
Auditing your Shopify app stack before it eats your margins
The average store we audit runs 20-plus apps. Here is how we decide which to keep, replace with native features or rebuild.
Sofia Lindqvist · May 06, 2025
WordPress · 5 min
Headless WordPress: when it pays off and when it does not
An honest look at the costs, benefits and hidden complexity of decoupling WordPress from its front end, with the questions we ask before recommending it.
Maya Okafor · Apr 23, 2025
Engineering · 5 min
Modernizing a legacy PHP application without a rewrite
Big-bang rewrites usually run late and ship with fewer features. How we use the strangler fig pattern to modernize legacy PHP one route at a time.
Maya Okafor · Apr 15, 2025
Design · 5 min
What WCAG 2.2 AA actually requires of a marketing site
Accessibility conformance sounds abstract until you map it to real pages. The criteria that trip up marketing sites most, and how to fix them.
Nadia Haddad · Apr 08, 2025
Performance · 5 min
Fixing LCP on image-heavy homepages
Large hero images are the most common cause of slow Largest Contentful Paint. A step-by-step approach to finding and fixing the delay.
Ravi Iyer · Apr 08, 2025
SEO · 5 min
What we check first in a technical SEO audit
A good audit is not a 200-item spreadsheet. The checks that most often explain lost visibility, and how we prioritize fixes.
Ravi Iyer · Apr 08, 2025
AI · 5 min
Automating invoice intake with LLMs without losing the audit trail
A document-processing pipeline that extracts invoice data reliably, flags what it is unsure about, and keeps finance and auditors comfortable.
Daniel Reyes · Mar 19, 2025
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
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
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Field notes from real client projects. No spam.