Tech Blog

A client asked me last month to "just add an AI chatbot" to their site, saying it was a checkbox item somewhere between updating the footer and fixing a broken form. Three weeks later, after actually building it, I had a much better appreciation for how much distance exists between "call the OpenAI API" and "ship an AI feature that doesn't embarrass you in front of real customers." Building AI features with OpenAI APIs is genuinely more accessible than it was two years ago, but accessible isn't the same as simple, and the gap between the two is where most projects either succeed quietly or fail publicly. What's Actually Easy Now Credit where it's due, the barrier to entry has dropped considerably. A basic API call to generate text or answer a question is a handful of lines of code Function calling (letting the model trigger actions in your app) is well-documented and reasonably intuitive once you've built one Streaming responses, which ...

I had a client last year who was proud of a number: 340 backlinks acquired in six months. Impressive on paper. Then I actually looked at where they came from, and most were low-effort directory submissions and guest posts on sites nobody reads, sitting next to twelve other guest posts from twelve other companies that week. Meanwhile, a competitor with roughly a third as many backlinks kept outranking them and kept showing up more often when I ran test queries through AI search tools. The difference wasn't link count. It was how often that competitor's brand name showed up across the web, cited, referenced, and talked about, with or without a link attached. That's the shift worth paying attention to. Why brand mentions matter more than link quantity isn't just a contrarian take anymore, it's becoming the practical reality of how both traditional search and AI-driven search actually evaluate credibility. Why Link Quantity Stopped Being the Whole Game Google has been s...

A founder I work with called me a bit rattled a few weeks back. A customer had mentioned, almost in passing, that they'd asked ChatGPT to recommend a few companies in his industry and his name came up. Great news, except he had no idea it was happening, no record of what was actually said, and honestly, a slightly panicked look on his face when I asked what else the answer had included. He didn't know. Nobody did. That's the position most businesses are in right now, and I don't think it's dramatic to say it's a genuine blind spot. Learning how to track AI mentions of your brand isn't optional anymore if you care about how you're being represented in places you can't directly see. Here's what makes this so different from the brand monitoring most of us grew up doing. A Google Alert catches something permanent, an article, a forum post, a review that sits at a fixed URL you can go back and reread. An AI mention is generated fresh, in a private con...

A founder I was talking to a few weeks back had already spent two hours arguing with his co-founder about progressive web apps vs mobile apps before he even called me. Both of them had read the same three blog posts, both had opposite conclusions, and both were kind of right. That's the annoying truth about this decision, there isn't a universally correct answer, only a correct answer for your specific business, budget, and users. And most of the content out there skips that part entirely in favor of a tidy "PWAs are the future" or "native apps win, period" hot take. I've sat in on this exact conversation with clients more times than I can count, so let me try to actually walk through it honestly instead of picking a side to sound decisive. What a Progressive Web App Actually Gives You A PWA is basically a website that behaves like an app, it can be added to a home screen, work offline to some degree, send push notifications on Android (iOS is still stin...

A major CDN provider went down for about an hour last year, and I watched three of our clients' sites go completely dark within minutes of each other, despite none of them sharing hosting, a codebase, or a development team. What happens when your CDN goes down is a question most businesses never think to ask until it's already happening, and by then, the honest answer is usually: not much you can do in the moment except wait, because almost nobody plans for this scenario in advance. It's an understandable blind spot. CDNs feel like invisible infrastructure that just works, quietly serving your images, fonts, and static assets faster than your origin server could on its own. Most business owners have never heard of the specific provider powering their site's assets, and most developers set it up once during launch and rarely think about it again until something breaks. That's exactly the problem; the thing you never think about is precisely the thing capable of takin...