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Serilog enrichers: the hidden cost of every log line

Serilog enrichers: the hidden cost of every log line

Serilog enrichers run on every log event, so an innocent property can quietly hit your database thousands of times an hour. What we learnt logging Ucommerce order IDs, buffering logs in memory and destructuring EF entities, with the fixes we now use on every project.

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Umbraco Commerce payment retries: the hidden order number trap

Cancel a payment, come back and pay, and Umbraco Commerce may issue a new order number and overwrite the first attempt. Here's what that means for payment history, customer service and logging, and how to plan for it.

How We Decide Which Commerce Engine an Umbraco Project Gets

Asked at Codegarden when we switched to a commerce plugin, the honest answer is that we didn't switch. Our own engine still trades, uCommerce takes the complex builds, and Umbraco Commerce earned the mid-market tier one small project at a time. Here's how a platform earns its place.

AI Agents Won't Wait for Your Overnight Stock Sync

Two of the three sites in our Christmas experiment ran delayed stock feeds with ring-fenced allocations. They showed "out of stock" while the warehouse was full. That leak cost them 10x in revenue - and with AI agents joining the buying journey, stale data is about to get pricier.

The month that vanished into Fridays off

Summer leave has fragmented into single days and long weekends. It's better for the people taking it, but it removes the run-up discipline that used to turn open questions into decisions, and projects are quietly losing weeks to it.

Sites are always under attack. You get used to it

Every website is being probed right now, and almost none of it is aimed at you specifically. Why attack volume has climbed since AI lowered the barrier to entry, what modern hosted checkouts really expose, and the low-cost changes that handle most of the noise.

The Plug-and-Play Myth: What Shopify's App Store Doesn't Tell You

"Can't we just use a plugin?" Plug-and-play is real, but only for businesses shaped like the plug. Why ERP-connected businesses end up paying bespoke prices for templated constraints, and why the fulfilment integration everyone fears is the easy part.

How We Price Projects We Can't Fully Scope Yet

How do you price a project you can't fully scope until discovery is done? Honestly: in bands that double, narrowed by discovery, then committed as a watermark figure with a visible contingency ceiling. Here's the model we use, including the bit we get wrong.

You're Not Buying a Website. You're Buying Operational Improvement

A client once briefed three agencies to build the same Christmas shop. We cost double, and our site made ten times the revenue. The lesson: nobody's really buying a website. They're buying operational improvement, and that changes how you price, pitch and choose.

AI agents can't buy what they can't read

AI agents read your site through its accessibility tree, the same structure screen readers use. That makes WCAG work commercially interesting for the first time. Here's what agents read, what the research does and doesn't prove, and why the AI framing is a trap worth avoiding.