Latest articles on software development, technology, and everything in between.
Most Shopify agencies sell theme work, app installs, and configuration. But when your business needs custom credit logic, ERP synchronization, or embedded workflows, you need an engineer — not a theme person.
Most WordPress performance advice is written for brochure sites, not WooCommerce stores. Here is what actually makes a store faster, where Redis and object cache help, how transients work, where Cloudflare fits, and which changes usually waste time.
Straight answers on hiring developers, choosing platforms, fixing problems, and building software that fits your business.
Your business has a web application that works. Your team uses it from their desks. Your clients use it from their laptops. But now you have field staff who need access from their phones, or clients who want to check status on the go.
Your business needs two systems to talk to each other. Your website and your ERP. Your CRM and your email platform. Your e-commerce store and your logistics provider. You have been quoted on this work and the numbers are all over the place.
You are an international company looking for quality development work at reasonable rates. You have tried India. Maybe Eastern Europe. The experience was mixed. South Africa is increasingly on the shortlist.
You are looking at a developer's portfolio. There are screenshots of attractive websites. There are logos of companies they have worked with. There is a list of technologies they know. It looks professional. But you have no idea whether they can actually deliver what you need.
Calendly works for scheduling a 30-minute call. But your business does not sell 30-minute calls. Your booking system needs to handle staff with different availability schedules across multiple locations, resources that cannot be double-booked, and pricing that changes based on duration, day of week, and customer type.
Your WordPress site is an island. Customers place orders, fill in forms, book appointments, and create accounts. That data lives in WordPress. Your CRM, accounting system, inventory management, and email platform are separate islands.
Every day, your team does the same thing. Open the Shopify admin. Check new orders. Copy data into another system. Send a manual email. Update a spreadsheet. This is not running a business. This is being a human integration layer between systems that should be talking to each other.
Your business runs on Monday.com for project management. Xero for accounting. A shared Google Sheet for inventory. HubSpot for customer tracking. And a booking system that does not talk to any of them.
You run a medical or dental practice. Your current software is either too rigid, too expensive, or too generic. You have thought about custom software but assumed it was out of reach.
You have installed a plugin that does 80% of what you need. The other 20% is the part that matters for your business. There is no settings toggle, no add-on, and no workaround that closes the gap.
Your website is showing content you did not put there. Or it is redirecting visitors to a casino site. Or Google is showing a "This site may be hacked" warning. You are not sure what happened, how bad it is, or whether your customer data has been compromised.
You need software built. You are not sure who to hire. The freelancer quoted R40,000. The agency quoted R350,000. The offshore team quoted R15,000. They are all quoting on the same project description.
You bought a POS system off the shelf. It worked fine when you had one location and a simple product catalogue. Now you have multiple branches, complex pricing rules, and your staff spends half their time working around the system instead of working in it.
If you are setting up a WooCommerce store in South Africa, one of the first decisions you face is how to accept payments. South Africa has its own payment gateway landscape, and the three most common options are not interchangeable.
Every morning, someone on your team opens Shopify. They look at the new orders. Then they open your ERP. Then they type in each order. Customer name. Address. Line items. Quantities. Prices. One by one. This takes hours.
Shopify is changing how checkout works. If your store uses customized checkout pages, Shopify Scripts, or checkout.liquid modifications, those will stop working. This is not a maybe.
Your developer stopped answering messages three weeks ago. The website is half-built. The app is not finished. You have already paid most of the project fee. And now you are stuck with something that does not work.
You have three quotes sitting in your inbox. One is R40,000. One is R250,000. One is R900,000. They are all for the "same" project. This is not unusual. It is the reality of buying custom software in South Africa.
Somewhere in your business there is a spreadsheet that runs everything. Maybe it tracks orders. Maybe it manages inventory. Maybe it is the schedule, the pricing engine, and the reporting system all in one workbook with 14 tabs.
You have spent an hour in the Shopify App Store. You have tried every search term you can think of. You have installed three apps, tested them, uninstalled them. None of them do what you actually need.
You installed a caching plugin. You optimized your images. You might have even switched hosts. Your WooCommerce store is still slow. That is because the advice you followed was written for WordPress blogs, not online stores.
You clicked "Update" and now your store is gone. White screen. A cryptic error message. Maybe nothing loads at all. I have fixed this exact situation on more than a hundred WordPress and WooCommerce sites since 2011.
As a software developer and consultant with a wealth of real-world business, service delivery, and retail experience, I am well-equipped to guide you in building a successful and functional e-Commerce platform. My background in corporate sales, coupled with my experience as a network engineer, developer, and franchise owner, gives me a unique perspective on how to run and manage a business effectively.
This article explores the solution to the limitations of the MemberPress API in retrieving data added through custom fields. I developed a NodeJS API that creates a temporary table in memory to combine data from the WordPress database, the membership tables, and the post table. The refined data is then imported into a PostgreSQL database for fast, responsive report generation with data partitioning and redundancy.
Many businesses and organizations rely on spreadsheets for data management, but with the advancement of cloud-based applications and databases, it's time to consider a change. This article highlights the benefits of switching to a cloud-based solution and why it's worth the upgrade.
Next.js is a powerful framework that combines the best of Node.js API development and React app development, streamlining the software development process while still providing scalability and customization options. With its built on React and NodeJS, Next.js offers fast performance, SEO optimization, a wide range of rendering options, dynamic dashboards, and built-in security features. It provides a secure, efficient and flexible platform for building dynamic and interactive web experiences, making it a great choice for businesses, developers, and marketers.
Learn how to efficiently retrieve key values and their paths in JSON objects using JavaScript. This article provides concise examples and functions for developers to get started with.
So while been under lockdown for the last 2 months, I have been busy coding out my new website. Using the framework Gatsby, I build it using React and GraphQL. React is the same JavaScript framework that is used to power apps like Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb and so forth. React is also used to build native mobile applications for iOS and Android or even Windows or Mac OS. Gatsby in its own is a PWA (Progressive Web App) React application, but in this case it fulfils the role of a website that renders static content at blazing speeds. Since being a React Application, you can also build out other progressive web-apps inside Gatbsy that hooks into your website or even add e-commerce functionality. GraphQL is the data source that supplies the content to the Gatsby powered site. GraphQL can fetch data, via API calls, from almost any Content Management System, which are not limited to WordPress, Drupal, Joomal or even Contentful.
