Engineering Notes

Real problems from real WordPress & WooCommerce projects: how they broke, how I traced them, and how to fix them.

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October 15, 2025 · 7 min read

Why WooCommerce Orders Fail Silently, and How to Trace a Payment Race Condition

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A WooCommerce store was silently losing ~12% of orders. Here's how I traced it to a race condition between the payment gateway and a custom order status.

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November 19, 2024 · 7 min read

The Silent Card-Update Bug Hiding in Membership Sites (a Timing Race, Not a Plugin Bug)

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Customers updating their card on a membership site would sometimes hit a dead error page, but only sometimes, with no obvious pattern. That inconsistency was...

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September 5, 2023 · 8 min read

Why WooCommerce Shows 'No Shipping Options' (and $0 Tax on Every Order)

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A store was charging $0 tax on every single order and couldn't ship internationally at all. Neither problem was a WooCommerce bug. Here's the actual checklis...

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March 14, 2022 · 9 min read

The WordPress Customizer CSS Trap: Why Menus and Buttons Vanish on Hover

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A header menu and an account link were going invisible on hover. The cause wasn't a plugin conflict or a broken theme. It was three lines of custom CSS, and ...

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