I don’t normally do retrospectives for each year for products, posts, work, or anything.
Given that I didn’t write as much as I have in years passed, I thought I’d share what the most popular articles I’ve shared over the last year in hopes of both of surfacing some older content but also setting the tone for the coming year.
2022: Most Useful Articles
- How I Set Up My 2021 MacBook Pro. Here’s how I set up my 2021 MacBook Pro along with links to all the software and the method by which I install them (either via the Mac App Store, Homebrew, or Direct Downloads).
- Installing, Configuring, and Setting Up Xdebug in Visual Studio Code. This is everything that needs to be done to install Xdebug with a Homebrew-based environment and to work with the software within Visual Studio Code.
- Writing Helper Functions in Procedural Programming in WordPress. Here’s how you can write domain-specific, testable helper functions in procedural programming in WordPress.
- WP Plugin Scaffold: Easily Start a Composer-based WordPress Plugin. The WP Plugin Scaffold repository contains a a very basic set of files that are needed to spin up a Composer-based WordPress Plugin.
- How to Dynamically Load Classes by Namespace in PHP. To dynamically load classes by namespaces in PHP, you need a Registry, and a way to parse the concrete files from a directory based on its namespace.
- Using Ray in WordPress Development: Rendering Data and Data Structures. Ray makes it easy to start measuring performance of your code both in WordPress and in standalone PHP solutions.
- Writing for WordPress Has to Change (For Me). still believe that WordPress continues to mature it its own weird way with its own wild economy. And I still think that I’ll continue to work in it as I still enjoy the problems I’m solving on a day-to-day basis.
- Installing Old Versions of PHP With Homebrew. I love the speed at which PHP is moving these days and how fast the new versions are, too but that doesn’t mean the software on which we’re going is going to consistently be able to keep up with the fast release cycles.
- Using GrumPHP, Composer 2 and PHP 7.2. Note that I was running PHP 7.2 and Composer 2 while trying to find a version of GrumPHP that supports Composer 2. It’s a tedious task but here’s what you need.
- There’s More to WordPress Than FSE and Headless. I think we’re also forgetting the fact that WordPress is far more malleable than FSE and Next.js or, more simply put, locked into having React be the primary thing on which we focus.
- Dracula Theme for Preformatted WordPress Blocks. That’s when I found
highlight.js
and a Dracula theme for it. So I wrote a small plugin for WordPress that works with the existing Preformatted block and changes the color scheme to match that of Dracula. - Quick Tip: Sort All Users by Metadata. If you’re working with the All Users screen in WordPress and want to sort all users by metadata, it’s possible with the
pre_get_users
hook. - A Backend Engineer Learns to Build Block Editor Blocks. I thought it might be worth holding myself to the task I mentioned in the previous article on writing better the Block Editor tutorials.
Here’s to writing more in 2023 but, then again, I’ve said that before so we’ll see. 🙂