Field notes
Writing from the build.
Opinionated, technical, and specific. Migration guides, benchmarks, and the architecture decisions behind headless commerce and content platforms. No listicles.
Three things Shopify does for you that you don't notice until you self-host
Migrating Increddy off Shopify meant reimplementing three things Shopify handles invisibly: multi-currency, payment orchestration, and inventory logic. Here's what that actually took.
How two teams on separate repos stayed in sync without a shared codebase
How Increddy's frontend and backend teams, on separate repositories owned by separate people, stayed in sync through living contract documents instead of a monorepo.
We replaced Shopify's backend under a live storefront, without touching the frontend
The engineering story behind migrating Increddy's commerce backend from Shopify to self-hosted Medusa v2, while keeping the live Next.js frontend, Directus CMS, and helpdesk completely unchanged.
How we made Increddy's key delivery idempotent under concurrent events
A distributed-systems deep-dive into the hardest problem in a license-key storefront: reserving exactly one key per order under retrying webhooks and two independent reservation triggers.
Display currency vs. charge currency: a checkout UX decision that matters
Why conflating 'what currency do you see prices in' with 'what currency will your card be charged in' breaks international checkout, and how Increddy's checkout treats them as two separate decisions.
How to hire an app development agency: a founder's checklist
A practical checklist for hiring an app development agency: what to ask about ownership, platform choice, and post-launch support before signing anything.
Why headless commerce ownership actually matters
Why owning your commerce stack, not just renting a headless storefront on top of a hosted platform, changes the long-term economics and flexibility of the business.
Medusa vs. Saleor vs. Vendure: choosing an open-source commerce backend
A practical comparison of the three leading open-source headless commerce engines, covering language, extensibility model, API style, and the kind of project each one fits, with a clear decision rule.
Directus vs. Strapi vs. Contentful: choosing a headless CMS in 2026
How the three most-compared headless CMSs actually differ, from hosting model and data layer to pricing shape and editor experience, plus a decision rule for picking one.
Medusa vs. Shopify for headless commerce in 2026
A practical comparison of Medusa and Shopify's headless setup, covering ownership, cost at scale, customisation, and operational burden, with a clear rule for which to choose.
Field Notes
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Occasional posts on headless commerce, CMS architecture, and Next.js performance. No cadence quota, no spam.