Historical data analysis when MySQL runs out of room
Running decades of data through wp_postmeta will take your server down. Here is how I structured a 500 million row temperature dataset as an OLAP schema and queried it with MDX instead of raw SQL.
Category: Bug Fixing
WooCommerce REST API special characters: what 10.5 fixes
WooCommerce 10.5 fixes two decoding bugs that broke Arabic, Persian and Chinese attribute names and values on variation writes. What changed, how to test it with cURL, and which old workarounds to pull out.
Measure Python code performance before you optimize
A WooCommerce sync script went from ten minutes to three hours after the catalog grew. cProfile showed the API was fine and a nested loop building strings was eating 70% of the runtime.
The actor-critic method and the bugs that stall it
REINFORCE was too slow for a warehouse path-finding bot, so I switched to the actor-critic method and hit three problems on the way: an undetached TD target, snapshot rewards the agent gamed, and a gamma that erased the payoff.
Designing for panic: emergency UX design in WordPress
A hanging WooCommerce checkout on Black Friday taught me that a nicer spinner does not calm anyone down. Notes on cognitive tunneling, single-tasking flows, transient locks against panic clicks, and what an emergency mode looks like.
WordPress data processing lessons from Advent of Code
A 10,000 SKU WooCommerce import kept hanging, and the previous dev’s answer was a 2GB memory limit. Advent of Code puzzles point at the real fix: sketch the logic first, validate the input, batch the writes.
Using CSS cascade layers on a legacy stylesheet
I inherited a landing page with 450 lines of IDs, duplicate selectors and !important flags everywhere. Notes on moving it onto cascade layers: the five-layer order I settled on, where media queries belong, and why !important inverts layer priority.
Why a green Lighthouse score can still hide a slow site
A client’s desktop PageSpeed score was 98 while his conversions fell. Why lab tests miss what real visitors feel, and how to time a WooCommerce cart action with the User Timing API.
Managing high-resolution image assets without killing performance
A client’s wallpaper gallery took down its own dashboard hours after launch. Pruning the image sizes WordPress generates and offloading originals to object storage cut upload processing by about 70%.
Why XPath still beats CSS selectors in messy scrapers
A legacy vendor portal with no IDs, no classes and no API broke every CSS selector we threw at it. One XPath expression replaced fifty lines of them, and it has not broken since.