Field notes

Guides

Practical how-tos and field notes from real engagements, organised by discipline. The thinking and the step-by-step, from systems actually built and operated here. Every guide here exists because something broke on a running system, or because the obvious answer turned out to be wrong, and the write-up is the one that was missing when it was needed.

Building a photography site that lasts: the system behind chriskelechukwu.com I'm a wedding photographer and an engineer. Here's how I built my own site to be beautiful, fast, and calm to run, and the four decisions that keep it that way. Fractional CTO vs fractional engineer: which one you actually need One advises, one delivers. How to tell whether your business needs technology strategy or a senior pair of hands that stays, and the rough size rule that decides it. Fractional engineering vs hiring in-house: the real cost math A senior hire costs €6,000 to €9,000 a month for one discipline. The honest arithmetic of fractional engineering, including the utilisation cost nobody prices in. What is fractional engineering? A plain guide for established businesses Senior engineering on retainer instead of payroll: what fractional engineering is, what it costs against a €6,000 to €9,000 a month hire, and how to spot a diluted provider. How to turn a calculator into a lead magnet that still ranks on Google A calculator answers a real money question, then asks for the visitor's details, capturing a high-intent lead. Here is how to build one that still ranks on Google: a small data layer, one honest function, a REST endpoint, a server-rendered fallback, and instant capture. Build vs buy, and how to replace a WordPress plugin without downtime A step-by-step guide to deciding when a WordPress plugin is worth replacing, then migrating your lead pipeline to custom code with zero downtime and no lost leads. Programmatic location pages that scale without becoming spam A practical build guide for generating hundreds of genuinely useful local service pages from a template plus data, with the guards that keep them ranking instead of getting penalised. How to make a heavy WordPress site load like it’s static A heavy, dynamic WordPress site can still load like a static one. Here is the four-layer cache and the one small purge manager that keeps it fast without ever serving a stale page. Running a multi-region WordPress site from one VPS How I run a fast, local-feeling site in many regions worldwide from a single small server, using an edge CDN, careful cache rules, and a repeatable deploy so adding a region is config not a rebuild. When your WordPress database buckles under load A database that crashes under load is almost never a hardware problem, it is a memory math problem, and here is how I found the cause and fixed it on a real site without buying a bigger server. Schema that inherits itself across a large site How I built a single JSON-LD schema generator that switches off every plugin's structured data, defines an Organization and WebSite base once, and lets each page type inherit it and add only its own piece, so a thousand-page site emits one coherent graph instead of several plugins each publishing a competing version of the same facts.
Free resource

Get the production-readiness checklist

Twenty-seven checks that separate a system you can sleep on from one that pages you at 2am. Drop your email and the checklist is on its way.

Read it now: open the checklist →

The first step

Start with a conversation.

A short conversation first, to work out which of the two routes you are on and whether this is a problem I can solve. The audit is the paid step that follows, and what it produces is yours whether or not anything comes after it.

Book a 25-minute diagnostic Send a message

Twenty-five minutes on Google Meet, and a straight answer either way.

  1. 01

    You describe what you are running, in whatever words you use for it internally.

  2. 02

    You get a straight answer on whether the audit is worth doing at all, including when it is not.