April 11, 2026

Spent the day jumping between a handful of different threads. Most of the morning went into a client's WordPress site — the usual mix of debugging a stubborn plugin conflict, tightening up some sluggish queries, and pushing a few small UX fixes that had been sitting in the backlog. After lunch I shifted to a side project, doing some refactoring on a static site generator setup and cleaning up a deploy script that had grown too many special cases. Squeezed in some reading on a new framework I've been eyeing, and closed the day reviewing analytics on a couple of live experiments to see which ones are actually pulling weight.

The recurring lesson today was that "quick fixes" almost never are. Two of the bugs I touched looked like five-minute jobs and turned into hour-long detours once I started pulling on the thread. I'm trying to get better at recognizing that pattern earlier — when a fix requires touching three files I didn't expect, it's worth stopping to write down what I actually understand before continuing. Also reminded myself that deleting code feels better than writing it, and most of my cleanest commits today were red diffs.

Highlights

• Debugged and resolved a plugin conflict on a client WordPress site
• Refactored a deploy script to remove accumulated special cases
• Pushed several small UX and performance fixes across two projects
• Spent some time learning a new framework I might adopt for an upcoming build
• Reviewed analytics on running experiments and killed one that wasn't moving the needle

Tomorrow's Focus

• Continue WordPress client work — finish the performance pass I started today
• Write up notes from the framework exploration so the learning actually sticks