Articles & Resources
Technical articles on web development, eCommerce, and performance optimization. Practical insights from 20+ years in the field.
Shopify Alone vs The Highlander Ecommerce Ecosystem: Why You Don't Have to Compromise
Highlander connects a custom Astro storefront to Shopify's commerce engine with CRM, analytics, and AI built in. No compromises.
Custom Development vs. SaaS vs. The Ecosystem Approach
Beyond custom builds and limited SaaS: config-driven ecosystems deliver custom-grade results at SaaS speed. The third option explained.
What Articles Are For
Articles are the long-form pieces — the decisions that come up before a project starts and cost real money when they go the wrong way. Build custom or buy off the shelf. Run e-commerce on a hosted platform or own the stack. These are the questions a business owner has to answer once, live with for years, and rarely gets a straight comparison on, because most of the writing about them is published by someone selling one of the options.
They are deliberately separate from the blog, which moves faster and covers what is happening right now — a breach worth learning from, a change in how AI surfaces businesses, a tool that turned out to matter. If you want the short version of what we think, read the blog. If you are about to make an expensive decision, read these.
How These Are Written
Every article here comes out of work that actually happened — migrations that went badly, platforms that hit a wall at a predictable scale, integrations that quietly broke when a vendor deprecated an endpoint. That has some consequences for what you will and will not find:
- No client names. Businesses are described by industry, never identified.
- The tradeoffs against our own position included, not just the ones that flatter it.
- Specific numbers where we have them, and an admission where we do not.
- Recommendations that sometimes amount to "you do not need to hire anyone for this."
If a question here maps onto something you are weighing right now, the case studies show how it played out in practice, and a short conversation will get you further than another twenty tabs of research.
