Rob Kalajian

The work

My focus is enterprise-scale web systems: WordPress platforms running hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, headless CMS architectures serving editorial teams who need speed without technical babysitting, and Jamstack pipelines that keep Lighthouse scores green without engineering heroics.

I've led infrastructure migrations from self-managed Roots stacks to WPEngine at zero downtime. I've built accessibility-first platforms under regulatory scrutiny in the cannabis space. I've implemented CI/CD workflows that turned deployment anxiety into a non-event for engineering teams.

The philosophy

Technical debt is financial debt. Every shortcut in a PR review is a future invoice sent to someone else's sprint. I enforce that understanding through code review standards, Tailwind CSS discipline, and a “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” QA approach because the cost of prevention is always smaller than the cost of repair.

On AI: I use it as an engine, not a pilot. AI accelerates prototyping. I apply 23 years of architectural judgment to decide what stays, what gets rewritten, and what never makes it past review.

The context

My full-stack background isn't just a talking point. Two decades of Linux system administration (server provisioning, database management, DNS, caching layers) means I design front-end architectures that account for the infrastructure they run on. Most front-end architects have never provisioned a server. That gap shows up in production.

Outside the work: I'm a competitive yo-yo player and the curator of The Yoyo Archive, a living database of yo-yo history. I also write about tabletop RPGs, board games, and skill toys.