Field Notes
Not tutorials and not announcements — write-ups of things that went wrong, with the evidence attached. Every number in these came from a test run or a live install.
WP-Cron runs inside a real person’s page load. Here’s what that costs, why “it works” is the most dangerous thing it can report, and what to do about it.
Read →A plugin reported “processed 10 records” and stored none of them. Everything passed. The mistake was one bool cast — and the reason it hid is worth more than the fix.
Read →I once wrote a plugin that advertised a “1,400× speedup”. It never measured anything. Here is how that happens, and the five questions that catch it.
Read →Every one of these started as a note to myself while fixing something. They’re published because the fix is rarely the interesting part — the interesting part is why the problem was invisible for so long, and what would have caught it sooner.