Dev Partners · Brain Dump

The Brain Dump

Real talk on software, business efficiency, and the stuff that actually drives growth. No content marketing fluff. Just things we have found useful, interesting, or worth writing down.

Jason Wheeler, co-founder of Dev Partners
What you will find here: Practical articles on custom software development, Shopify, Laravel, WordPress, business efficiency, ecommerce, and the occasional honest opinion piece from Rob and Jason.
Dev Partners · Brain Dump

The Rebuild You Never Budgeted For

The upfront price of vibe-coded software is almost never the real price. The rest of it turns up later, in downtime, security problems, support hours and a rebuild that nobody put in the budget. Here is where the money actually goes.
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Dev Partners · Brain Dump

From 23 Seconds to 200 Milliseconds

The same AI-built application from our last post had a second problem: its main screen took twenty-three seconds to load. Here is what it actually took to fix, and why most apps in this state are repairable rather than write-offs.
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Dev Partners · Brain Dump

A Customer Could See Someone Else’s Invoices

A founder rang us about a performance problem. Forty accounts into a promising SaaS product, one of their clients had just mentioned, quite casually, that they could see another company’s invoices. This is what had actually gone wrong, and why it took forty customers to find it.
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Dev Partners · Brain Dump

Your AI App Works in the Demo. That’s the Problem.

Everything looks fine when one person clicks around a demo. That is precisely why a clean demo tells you almost nothing about whether your software is sound, and why the failures politely wait until real traffic arrives before showing up.
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Dev Partners · Brain Dump

The Last 20% Is Where AI Leaves You Stranded

AI builders get you to something that looks finished astonishingly quickly. The trouble is that the eighty per cent it does brilliantly is the easy eighty per cent, and everything expensive lives in whatever is left over.
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Dev Partners · Brain Dump

Vibe Coding Is Fine — Until Real People Use It

Vibe coding gets sneered at a lot, usually by people who have never had to ship anything on a budget. It is genuinely brilliant for some things. It also has a very specific point at which it stops being fine, and knowing where that line sits matters far more than picking a side.
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Dev Partners · Brain Dump

We Treat AI Like a Very Fast Junior Developer

We use AI every single day, and we never let it near architecture, data design or security on its own. Here is what that actually looks like day to day, and why the very fast junior developer comparison is rather more than a neat line.
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Dev Partners · Brain Dump

AI Is a Brilliant Typist and a Terrible Architect

AI writes code faster than any developer alive. It still has no idea how your system should be built. That gap, between typing and architecture, is what decides whether software sails through its first year or falls over the moment real people start using it.
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Dev Partners · Brain Dump

Bulk Tagging Shopify Products with PHP: One Tag, Thousands of Products

Product tags in Shopify are deceptively useful. Automated collections, storefront filtering, discount eligibility, third-party app targeting — a well-applied tag can touch a lot of moving parts at once. The problem is when you need to apply one to a large list of products. Doing it one API call at a time is slow, burns through your rate limit, and falls over if anything goes wrong halfway through.

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Dev Partners · Brain Dump

Shopify Bulk Operations in PHP: Mutations & Queries Done Properly

If you've ever tried to push several thousand inventory level updates to Shopify in one go, or pull back a catalogue-wide list of non-taxable variants, you'll already know that hammering the standard GraphQL endpoint isn't the answer. Rate limits bite, jobs stall, and you have no reliable way to know whether the whole thing finished.

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What our clients say

19 clients. A few of their words.

Working with Dev Partners to redesign and modernise our WMS system: the whole process has been thoroughly professional from the outset and a delight to work with. Cannot recommend enough.

Great agency. Have used Dev Partners for several years and they have built 20+ sites for us, in addition to taking on our legacy websites, upgrading and maintaining. Easy to work with and some great practical ideas to improve our digital offerings.

Jones Hire have been working with Dev Partners on several projects, which have been very successful. They linked our catering database to a new improved website so clients can easily place and update orders, created a custom warehouse picking app to fulfil all our challenging requirements, and are currently developing a custom transport app to streamline our loading and delivery process.

We have been trying to reinvent our website for over 5 years, trying to make it convert and failing each time. Spoke to Rob at Dev Partners, the team helped create our new site and the improvement was instant.

We have been working with Rob and the team for about 10 years now. Dev Partners helped us build a completely bespoke CRM from scratch which manages our daily business and is always well maintained. We have been able to use the system and roll it out in our new franchise branches.

We collaborated with Dev Partners on the front end of a fairly complex telemarketing platform. Rob and Jason took the time to properly understand the moving parts, asked the right questions, and delivered a clean, intuitive interface that's made the system far easier for our team to use.

I have been working with the team at Dev Partners for the last 3 years and we have always been impressed with the speed in which they act on things for us, along with the honest open communication. The team are a valuable and vital part of our supply chain.

We've had a program for our business in the electronic security sector that Dev Partners developed and keep up to date. They've never let us down, always there when needed. Thanks Rob and the team.

Dev Partners have been working with us for just over 2 years. They have significantly upgraded and redesigned our existing web platforms, and always deliver a first class service.

Dev Partners helped us build an event website. The team were very knowledgeable, easy to work with and quick to deliver a high quality product.

Working with Dev Partners has been an exceptional experience. Their team is highly skilled, professional, and committed to delivering results. What truly sets them apart is their communication and transparency; we always felt informed, supported, and confident.

We've worked with Dev Partners a few times to support us on bespoke web build tasks. They're very easy to work with, approachable, and explain the detail in a way that's understandable. A great partner for technical issues at sensible prices.

Excellent customer service backed up with solid experience. As a media business we have had five websites built by Dev Partners. I would certainly recommend them.

Found Dev Partners and they were great, nothing too much trouble. They managed to help us with integrating our old existing system with Shopify.

I've worked with Rob and his team off and on for many years and have always found them to be professional, knowledgeable, and best of all, they listen to their clients and deliver what is required.

We have worked with Dev Partners for 7 years and can highly recommend them for their expertise and excellent customer service.