Five years ago I was building WordPress websites for clients. The kind of work where you install a theme, build a child theme on top of it, write custom PHP for features the theme never imagined, register post types for every content model the client needs, and wire everything together with hooks and filters until it actually does what the client asked for.
That was the job. Not dabbling. Full time. Real projects. Real deadlines.
Today I write Node.js APIs, React dashboards, Next.js applications, and Vue.js interfaces. WordPress is still in the stack on most projects. But the stack is bigger now.
This is the honest story of how that happened. Not a tutorial. Not a career advice post. Just what actually occurred.
What building WordPress websites actually taught me
