The WooCommerce bug I fixed in exchange for a week in Chiang Mai

Aarav messaged me through the platform on a Sunday. By Thursday I was on a plane. Here is what the exchange actually looked like, because I think the details matter more than the story arc.

The brief: WooCommerce store, product cards breaking under 400px viewport width, checkout flow confusing on mobile, cart abandonment was probably high as a result. Aarav had written up detailed notes with screenshots. The staging site was already set up. The problems were real.

I spent the first evening going through the issues. The responsive breakpoints were overriding each other in a way that was obviously a theme conflict rather than a WooCommerce issue. The checkout problem was more interesting — the payment gateway had injected its own styles that didn’t play nicely with the theme’s CSS variables.

Total actual work: about nine hours across five days. We’d agreed on two to three hours a day and I ended up front-loading most of it because I was interested in the problem.

The apartment was exactly what the listing said: quiet, the standing desk was real, the WiFi was genuinely 500 Mbps. I worked better in that room than I had in my own apartment in Porto for the previous month. I don’t entirely know why. There was something about having a clear, defined task in an unfamiliar place that made me focus.

Aarav cooked dinner twice. We talked about WooCommerce optimization for longer than either of us probably should have. He left me a detailed review. I left him one.

The thing people ask me when I describe this is whether it felt transactional. It didn’t. It felt like the cleanest kind of collaboration: both parties knew exactly what they were offering, both delivered, both got something from it that they couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. No money changed hands. No contract. No awkwardness.

I’m going back to Chiang Mai in August. I’ve already messaged to see if the room is free.