Hi, I'm Raul Cruz!

I'm a web developer with over 20 years of experience, mostly building custom themes and plugins within the WordPress ecosystem. While WordPress is my home base, I've also built my fair share of web apps and worked across various other CMS platforms.

Lately, I've been having a lot of fun pushing boundaries and experimenting with headless WordPress and diving into static site generators like Eleventy. I genuinely love a good challenge and am always eager to try new tools.

When I step away from the screen, I'm usually traveling, shooting photos, or keeping up with my favorite sports teams. Most importantly, I take my role as the "cool uncle" very seriously, which means you'll often find me in the stands cheering on my niece and nephew at their games.

Latest Posts

This is where I share the real-world highs and lows of my latest projects. Let's be honest, tech docs tell you how something works, but they rarely tell you how frustrating it can be to get there. I'm hoping my notes and personal takes make your own dev journey a little easier.

My 36-Hour Email Black Hole (And What Google Taught Me About MTA-STS)

A routine email migration turned into a 36-hour outage when Google refused to clear its MTA-STS cache. Here is what went wrong, why Google ignored updated DNS records, and the single precaution you should take 48 hours before your next mail migration.