Posted on

Modern Software Engineering in WordPress (We Were on a Break)

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a significant amount of time writing about a lot of things on how to achieve certain things in WordPress. And I don’t regret it (after all, it’s my career and it’s even the subtitle and focus of this blog).

But one of the things that I’ve opted to neglect is a focus more on topics that interest me such as object-oriented analysis, programming, design, and implementation. (And, of course, doing so within the context of WordPress.)

And sure, there are some articles where I’ve touched on it but I recently took a week off of pretty much everything except my [growing] family and during that time, I took stock of a variety of things.

One of those things included this particular site, its content, and the general focus of my career.

Continue reading “Modern Software Engineering in WordPress (We Were on a Break)”
Posted on

Participating in Voices of the elePHPant

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of writing the forward to Cal Evans book Using the WordPress REST API. Shortly thereafter, Cal asked if I’d join him on his podcast, Voices of the elePHPant, to talk a bit about software development in the context of WordPress.

And given that that’s what I’ve spent the majority of my career doing, it made sense to participate.

This not only gave me a chance to catch up with Cal “face-to-face” but also to share a bit about what it’s like working in this particular corner of the PHP community and in the WordPress economy.

Continue reading “Participating in Voices of the elePHPant”
Posted on

Privacy is Hard: Analytics

When speaking of web analytics and privacy, its not something I typically think of going hand-in-hand.

I mean, conventional wisdom may argue that we want to know as much as possible about those visiting our sites so we can ensure we’re writing content properly, building features out properly, and targeting all of the necessary metrics to make sure our site is successful.

And there’s truth to that, sure. But there’s still a level of privacy around what the user is sharing (and perhaps how it’s managed, who stores it, for how long, etc.).

Continue reading “Privacy is Hard: Analytics”
Posted on

Why I’m Archiving My GitHub Repositories

One of the things I’ve been considering for a while now (read: most of this year) is archiving my GitHub repositories and retiring what WordPress plugins I currently have available.

Last month, I spent time thinking about why I’d want to do so versus just letting them sit. Though there are multiple reasons for doing so, there’s one reason to which I kept returning (and plenty of others I’ll outline in moment).

But first, the TL;DR is this: There’s a single side project I want to work on without any distractions.

That’s it. Nothing elaborate, fancy, or groundbreaking. The thing about having a variety of other repositories available, though, is that there are occasional emails about bugs, feature requests, etc., all of which are appreciated but most of which I don’t have time on which to focus at the moment.

Instead, I think my time can be better spent on other work. And I think I want to spend my time on other things.

Continue reading “Why I’m Archiving My GitHub Repositories”