Notes from the workbench

Latest articles

The archive

• Aug 15, 2026Architecture Headless WordPress with Next.js: The Complete Architecture Guide 12 min → WPGraphQL vs REST, ISR with on-demand revalidation from WordPress hooks, preview mode, image handling and the hosting cost model. Built from real client migrations.
• Aug 18, 2026Frontend React Server Components Explained: The Mental Model You Actually Need 10 min → Server vs client components, the RSC payload, where data fetching belongs, and a migration path from a client-only React app. Clear rules, real code, common mistakes.
• Aug 12, 2026AI & ML Integrating LLM APIs into PHP and WordPress: A Practical Guide 10 min → Add AI features to PHP and WordPress safely: a cURL client with retries, streaming via SSE, prompt caching, cost control and a real content-summariser plugin walkthrough.
• Aug 10, 2026Performance Core Web Vitals in 2026: How to Fix INP, LCP and CLS for Good 11 min → A diagnosis-first approach to Core Web Vitals: find the real INP culprit with the Long Animation Frames API, preload the LCP image correctly and kill layout shift.
• Aug 8, 2026Backend Building a Production-Grade REST API with Node.js, Express and PostgreSQL 12 min → Not another todo API. Layered architecture, validation, connection pooling, idempotency keys, pagination, structured logging and graceful shutdown, with runnable code.
• Aug 5, 2026Frontend Next.js App Router Caching Guide: Stop Fighting Stale Data 9 min → The four Next.js caches explained with diagrams: request memoisation, data cache, full route cache and router cache. When to use revalidateTag, ISR and dynamic rendering.
• Aug 3, 2026Career How to Build a Developer Portfolio Website That Actually Gets You Hired 9 min → What hiring managers and Google both want from a developer portfolio: project case studies, technical SEO, schema markup, performance budget and the pages that convert.
• Aug 1, 2026Architecture System Design Fundamentals: Caching, Queues and Rate Limiting Explained 11 min → The three building blocks behind almost every scalable system, explained with diagrams and code: cache-aside vs write-through, queue back-pressure and token-bucket limiters.
• Aug 1, 2026Performance Why Custom WordPress Themes Still Outperform Page Builders in 2026 3 min → How replacing heavy visual builders with custom PHP themes and optimised grids cut load time by over 60% and fixed Core Web Vitals for real client sites.
• Jul 30, 2026AI & ML AI Agents with Tool Calling: Architecture Patterns That Actually Work 11 min → Move beyond chatbot demos. Compare the ReAct loop, planner-executor and router patterns for AI agents, with a TypeScript tool-calling loop, guardrails and cost limits.
• Jul 26, 2026DevOps CI/CD with GitHub Actions: Test, Build and Deploy to AWS 10 min → A complete pipeline: lint and test on pull requests, build a Docker image, push to ECR, deploy with zero downtime and roll back on failure. OIDC, no long-lived keys.
• Jul 22, 2026Frontend HTMX vs React: Choosing the Right Interactivity Model in 2026 9 min → An honest comparison from someone who ships both. Hypermedia vs component state, SEO, team skills, and the decision matrix I use for client projects, including this site.
• Jul 18, 2026Backend GraphQL vs REST vs tRPC: Picking an API Layer Without Regret 8 min → A decision framework instead of a hype cycle. Caching, type safety, client diversity, team size and the WordPress/Shopify realities that push most projects to REST.
• Jul 18, 2026Frontend Integrating React Components into Legacy PHP Applications 5 min → Modernise old PHP codebases by injecting React components with Vite, JSON hydration and hash routing, without a full rewrite or breaking SEO.
• Jul 14, 2026AI & ML Prompt Engineering for Developers: Structured Outputs, Schemas and Evals 9 min → Treat prompts as code: JSON schema outputs, few-shot examples, system prompt layering, versioning and automated evals so your LLM features stop breaking in production.
• Jul 10, 2026Performance Redis Caching Strategies for WordPress and Node.js 9 min → Object cache, full-page cache, fragment cache and rate limiting, with WordPress drop-in configuration and a Node.js cache-aside helper that handles stampedes correctly.
• Jul 8, 2026Frontend Tailwind CSS v4 Migration Guide: CSS-First Config, Theme Variables and Gotchas 8 min → Move from tailwind.config.js to the CSS-first @theme setup, understand the new Oxide engine, fix renamed utilities and migrate a WordPress theme without breaking production.
• Jul 4, 2026Architecture Monolith vs Microservices: Why You Should Start with a Modular Monolith 9 min → Microservices solve organisational problems most teams do not have. How to structure a modular monolith with enforced boundaries so you can extract services later, if ever.
• Jun 30, 2026Backend Modern PHP 8 Features Every WordPress Developer Should Be Using 9 min → Enums, readonly classes, match, named arguments, fibers and property hooks, shown through real WordPress theme and plugin code that is cleaner, safer and faster.
• Jun 26, 2026AI & ML Semantic Search for eCommerce with Embeddings and pgvector 10 min → Replace keyword-only product search with embeddings. Schema design, hybrid ranking with BM25, WooCommerce and Shopify sync strategies and the latency numbers I measured.
• Jun 25, 2026Architecture Headless Shopify: Is It Worth the Development Time? 4 min → The ROI of building custom storefronts on the Shopify Storefront API versus Liquid themes for mid-sized merchants, from a developer who has shipped both.
• Jun 20, 2026Architecture Event-Driven Architecture with Redis and BullMQ 10 min → Decouple slow work from HTTP requests. Producers, workers, retries with back-off, idempotent handlers, dead-letter queues and the order-processing flow I built for a store.
• Jun 16, 2026Backend Authentication in 2026: Passkeys, OAuth 2.1 and JWT Done Right 11 min → How modern auth actually fits together: WebAuthn passkeys for login, OAuth 2.1 with PKCE for delegation, short-lived JWTs with refresh rotation, and the mistakes to avoid.
• Jun 10, 2026Frontend TypeScript Patterns for Scalable React Apps 9 min → Discriminated unions for UI state, typed API layers with Zod, generic components, branded types and the tsconfig settings that catch bugs before your users do.
• Jun 6, 2026DevOps Cloudflare Workers and Edge Computing: A Practical Guide for Web Developers 9 min → What runs well at the edge and what does not. Build an A/B routing worker, a cache-aware API proxy and a geo personaliser with KV, plus how I front WordPress with Workers.
• Jun 2, 2026Career How to Stay Relevant as a Developer in the Age of AI 8 min → AI writes more of the code now. Here is what still commands a salary: systems thinking, debugging, product judgement, and how I restructured my own learning around it.
• May 28, 2026Backend Database Indexing Strategies for MySQL and PostgreSQL 10 min → How B-tree indexes work, composite index column order, covering indexes, reading EXPLAIN, and the WordPress postmeta query I took from 4.2s to 18ms with one index.
• May 20, 2026DevOps Nginx Performance Tuning for PHP Applications 9 min → Worker processes, keepalive, FastCGI caching, Brotli, HTTP/3 and PHP-FPM pool sizing. The exact config changes that doubled requests per second on a client VPS.
• May 14, 2026Architecture Designing Multi-Tenant SaaS Architecture: Data Isolation, Auth and Billing 11 min → Shared schema vs schema-per-tenant vs database-per-tenant, tenant resolution middleware, row-level security in PostgreSQL, and Stripe-based plan enforcement.
• May 10, 2026Career Building a Remote Web Career from Aligarh to the World 4 min → Reflections on moving from local freelance projects in Aligarh to full-time remote roles with digital agencies, and how to set up a workspace that supports it.
• Apr 22, 2026Career Remote Developer Interview Prep: System Design, Live Coding and Communication 9 min → A four-week plan for remote developer interviews: the system design template that works on a whiteboard call, live coding under time pressure and async communication tests.