Seymour Duncan, ongoing WooCommerce development

boltWhat went wrong

A store that sells guitar pickups and pedals lets fans reserve new gear before it ships. For those pre-orders the store places a hold on the buyer’s card at checkout, and charges it when the product is released. After a major version update to the store’s payment plugin, that hold quietly stopped happening. Checkout looked normal, no error appeared, and even the plugin’s built-in status screen reported no problems. The fault ran for about two weeks and came to light only when someone examined a single large pre-order by hand.

buildThe pre-order fix

• I tracked the fault down to one particular change inside that plugin update, and found a second, separate fault in the same release. I fixed both.
• I identified the 13 pre-orders that had no card hold, so the business could resolve them.
• I wrote automatic checks that confirm the pre-order payment hooks are still connected after any update, because a green status page proved not to be enough.

handshakeAlso on this project

• When the site was timing out, I found that one abusive visitor was using about 38% of its daily processing capacity. I blocked it at the hosting layer and the site recovered.
• I fixed a marketing-integration plugin fault that had been crashing about 2,000 times a day. Separately, I added crawler protections against aggressive bots.
• I traced repeated server errors to two pages that held the server’s limited workers for the full length of heavy jobs, and confirmed it against the live server logs.
• I cut 51 numbered releases of the store’s code on GitHub.

check_circleThe result

A later large pre-order was held, then released and charged as it should be, and the payment reached the company’s order system. Pre-order payments now have checks that alert the team when a plugin update breaks them. The abusive traffic was blocked, the crashing integration was fixed, and the store keeps getting regular updates, each one traceable to a tagged version of the code.

widgetsTools I used, in plain words