What eleven years on one stack actually taught me
Specialising is unfashionable advice. It's also why I can quote a rescue job in an hour instead of a week.
I started writing PHP in 2015. I've worked with Magento, Shopify and plenty of front-end tools along the way — but WordPress has been the constant. Specialising is unfashionable advice in an industry that loves new frameworks. Here's what it has given me.
Pattern recognition
The first time you see a WooCommerce checkout silently failing because of a caching rule, it takes a day to find. The tenth time, it takes ten minutes. Most "mysterious" WordPress problems are the same few problems in different clothes.
Honest quotes
When I know a stack deeply, I can estimate accurately. That means fixed quotes in writing, fewer surprises, and no padding "just in case." Clients can plan around a number they trust.
Knowing what not to build
Experience isn't only knowing how to build something. It's knowing when a plugin, a core feature or a simpler design already solves the problem — and saying so before the client pays for custom code.
Respect for maintenance
I've inherited enough abandoned sites to build every site as if I'll be the one maintaining it in five years. Clean code, documented decisions, fewer dependencies.
Breadth still matters — in service of depth
Working remotely for agencies in India, Malaysia, the UK and the US taught me different expectations, time zones and ways of communicating. Studying for a Master’s in Management now adds the business side: what the site is actually for, and how to measure it.
Depth in one thing makes you useful. Curiosity about everything around it makes you valuable.
If your project runs on WordPress, there's a good chance I've seen its problems before. That's the whole point.