Building a software project teaches you something tutorials cannot fully reproduce: what it takes to make an application work inside an existing system and remain useful to people who rely on it. In his account of building Bit CRM, a sales CRM plugin for WordPress, Shirajul Islam Shakur describes lessons in working within WordPress admin, extending established integrations, separating application state, designing tools for AI models, and maintaining software after its first release.
Why does shipping software teach you more than finishing tutorials?
A tutorial can give you a clean starting point and a guided route to a working feature. Shakur’s experience with Bit CRM exposed a different set of questions: how an application behaves in a host environment, how it fits alongside existing software, and what happens when other people depend on it.
That is not a reason to dismiss tutorials. They are useful for learning concepts and practicing techniques. The difference, in his account, is that a project with users adds responsibilities that a self-contained exercise may not: compatibility, maintainability, deployment, and the consequences of changing something other people already use.
Shakur presents this as a lesson from his own development journey, not as a measured comparison between tutorial learning and professional work. His central point is practical: building and caring for a real product creates problems that are difficult to anticipate from a blank-page exercise.
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What changes when a React app runs inside WordPress admin?
A React interface embedded in WordPress admin does not own the whole page. Shakur describes working amid WordPress styles, scripts from other plugins, and the conventions of the host application. Those conditions are part of the software’s operating environment, not automatically defects to remove.
This changes the developer’s task. Rather than assuming a controlled page, you have to understand what is already present, where your application’s boundaries are, and how to make it behave reliably within them. The useful question becomes how to build well in the environment that exists.
For developers, the broader lesson is that integration work is not merely a final packaging step. A feature can be sound in isolation and still cause problems when placed in a shared admin interface. Learning the host’s assumptions is part of implementing the feature.
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How should a plugin extend an existing product ecosystem?
Shakur says Bit CRM had to integrate with Bit Form, Bit Flows, and Bit Integrations, each with users and established data flows. His approach was to understand those existing patterns before extending them, rather than imposing a preferred design without regard for the system around it.
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That is a useful maintenance principle, but it does not mean every existing convention is automatically good. It means first learning why a convention exists and what depends on it. A developer can then make a deliberate choice: preserve it for compatibility, improve it carefully, or introduce a different approach where there is a clear reason.
In a connected product family, consistency can reduce friction for people using multiple tools and for developers working across them. But changes still need to account for existing behavior. Understanding the system before changing it helps reveal where a seemingly local decision may have wider effects.
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How did he divide server state from interface state?
Shakur reports using TanStack Query for database-backed server state and Zustand for browser-only interface state. In his description, the distinction helped prevent separate parts of the application from becoming competing sources of truth.
| State category | Examples in Shakur’s account | Tool he says he used |
|---|---|---|
| Database-backed server state | Deals, invoices, contacts, and activities | TanStack Query |
| Browser-only interface state | Open modals, filters, and in-progress form input | Zustand |
He describes a CRM that included a dashboard, client portal, invoice module, calendar, and an activity system for tasks, meetings, and calls. In an application with that range of features, clarity about where a value lives matters: duplicating the same information in multiple places can lead to inconsistent behavior.
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This is an account of his implementation approach, not an independently inspected description of the product’s code. The transferable idea is to decide which state belongs to the server and which exists only to support the current interface, then avoid maintaining unnecessary duplicate copies.
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What does building AI tools teach about interface design?
Shakur says work on an MCP server and a built-in AI assistant changed how he thought about tool design. When a CRM is driven through tools by systems such as Claude or ChatGPT, names, arguments, and errors need to communicate clearly without relying on visual context.
A person looking at an interface can often infer what a button does from its placement, nearby labels, or the screen they are on. A model calling a tool needs the tool definition and response to make the intended action understandable. In Shakur’s framing, that makes precise names and arguments—and useful error messages—especially important.
This is a design lesson he draws from his work, not confirmation of the current availability or capabilities of Bit CRM’s AI features. The general implication for model-facing software is straightforward: the less context a caller can see, the more explicit the tool contract must be.
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Why does the work continue after the interesting feature is finished?
Shakur’s closing advice is to build something with actual users and keep caring for it after the initial feature work. Once people rely on a project, decisions about naming, deployment, and maintainability affect more than the developer who wrote the code.
That ongoing responsibility is part of the learning, not a separate chore that begins after the “real” development ends. A project can teach you how to implement an idea; maintaining it teaches you to consider the people, integrations, and future changes connected to that idea.
His recommendation is not that every developer must start with a large product or that tutorials have no value. It is to move beyond exercises when ready: build something useful to others, then stay involved long enough to learn what keeping it useful requires.
Source and scope
This retrospective reflects what Shirajul Islam Shakur says he learned while building Bit CRM. It is his account, not an independent audit of the plugin’s architecture, current WordPress.org listing, feature set, compatibility, or commercial terms. Read the original article on DEV Community.
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