About
I like the parts of a product
that nobody volunteers for.
I build products end to end — nine WooCommerce plugins live on wordpress.org, and increasingly the AI layers that make products useful.
Istiaq Nirab · Dhaka, BD
Six-plus years in, most of my work has been the same shape: a WooCommerce store or a product that works until it doesn't, and a team that needs it to keep working while it changes underneath them. I take those.
On WordPress I picked the boring, well-documented option on purpose — hooks over overrides, the Settings API over a hand-rolled admin screen, and enough tests that a core update doesn't become a support ticket.
On the AI side I care about the unglamorous half: retrieval quality, evals, guardrails, and what happens when the model is wrong. A demo takes an afternoon; a product takes those.
- Maintained WBW Product Filter, WBW Currency and ExtendsWP Excel Import-Export — roughly 100,000 active installs between them.
- Handled support tickets end to end, including fixes applied straight onto live merchant stores.
- Owned GemBoards end to end — a Jira-style project management plugin — from first architecture through release and iteration.
- Built core features for StoreEngine, a WooCommerce-alternative commerce plugin, inside a larger team on a codebase live for external merchants.
- Developed the Gutenberg blocks behind StoreEngine cart and dynamic pages.
- Wrote the demo importer for aBlocks, a Gutenberg block library.
- Built and shipped 10+ WooCommerce extensions on wordpress.org — Subscription, Booking, Pre-Order, PDF Invoices, Advance Coupons, Bulk Product Selling, Checkout Field Customizer, SMS Notification and Social Sharing.
- Kept them working through Woo and core releases, with merchant support attached.
- Custom product work with Laravel on the backend and Nuxt.js on the front, plus WordPress problems that came with it.
- Built the early version of mypremo.com and contributed front end on acceler8.
- Ship a slice that works before a system that might.
- Make failures visible instead of preventing them from ever being mentioned.
- Data model first. Interfaces are easier to change than schemas.
- If a rule matters, it lives in one place and has tests.
- The person on support should be able to read what happened.
Sectors
- Retail & commerce
- SaaS
- Publishing
- HR & fintech
Engagements
- Plugin development
- AI feature teams
- Architecture review
Ways to work
- Fixed-scope project
- Embedded contract
- Advisory, part-time
Have something that needs building, fixing, or finishing? Write one paragraph — that's usually enough.