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.

Two designers, one client, three weeks in Medellín

The collaboration I was looking for turned out not to be with a developer, but with a copywriter from Beirut who arrived in El Poblado with a single backpack and a very good eye for what text should do next to a design.

I had posted the listing looking for someone who could write. He had found it while looking for exactly the kind of thing I was describing. We met for coffee before committing to anything. He was quiet, precise, funny in a dry way. His portfolio was excellent. We agreed to try a week and see.

The week became three weeks. We shipped the yoga studio rebrand faster than I had on any project where I was working with a remote team. Having someone in the same room who understood the brief as well as I did — who could look at a layout and say “the headline needs to do less work here” — was something I hadn’t experienced in years of remote work.

Medellín helped. El Poblado has this quality of productive ambiance — the kind of café culture where everyone seems to be working on something real and nobody is on a video call with their camera on making eye contact at the lens. We worked at the coworking space in the mornings and from a café in the afternoons. We ate arepas from the corner every day at around seven and talked through the work.

He taught me things about writing that I’ve applied to my design work since. I showed him how to think about visual hierarchy in a way that changed how he structures long copy. We each left with something the other had taught us, which was not in the brief but was probably the most valuable thing about the whole arrangement.

He posted the listing he found me through. I’m posting this story. If you’re a writer heading to Medellín and you want to work on something real, reach out.