Author: Tom (Page 148 of 428)

The Reality of Software Development Pressure

August 30, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

I recently heard a quote from someone (and if I could remember who said it, then I’d give attribution – but this is what happens when tweets just happen to scroll on by, right?) that I liked:

Setting deadlines before requirements is like setting a wedding date before you’ve met your partner.

And yes, it’s obviously tongue-in-cheek, but it’s lead me to think a lot about the breakdown that exists between all of the discussion around software best practices, things we should be doing, architectures and patterns we should be following, and then what we’re actually doing and what we’re shipping out to the world.

Development Pressure: Setting Requirements

At this point in my career, I can’t help but wonder if we enjoy talking about and discussing a lot of the things we should be doing as some escape to some of the hacked solutions we end up releasing.

How To Export Trello Board Members

August 29, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

For a couple of projects on which I work, I use Trello almost daily.

Export Trello Board Members

Some people find it the end-all, be-all of project management. I can’t say I agree with that statement, but it definitely helps streamline certain workflows (as far as I’m concerned).

But there’s one complaint that I have regarding the application: There’s no way to export the actual list of members for a given board (at least not at the time of this writing). Sure, you can export a board, but what happens when you want to contact all of the users?

There’s no way to export the actual list of members for a given board (at least not at the time of this writing). Sure, you can export a board, but what happens when you want to contact all of the users?

Sure, you can export a board, but what happens when you want to contact all of the users? I mean, I have a list of the users and their email addresses in a separate database, but Trello doesn’t allow me to export that data.

To export Trello board members, I put together a quick script that can run in the console of Chrome (maybe others, but I didn’t test). At the very least, it will return the names of the member so you can find them in your database, assuming you have one.

Practical Tips for Refactoring Code

August 26, 2016 / Tom

If you’ve worked on a project available to any reasonably sized audience, then you’re no doubt familiar with the bug reports, problems, and issues that can come in after something has gone live.

It’s true that the majority of the work in software comes after the first reason of a release.

Think about it this way:

Once you’ve built the product, released it, and then are responsible for maintaining it, how often do you have to triage issues? Then how frustrated are you that you’re fixing something that wasn’t foreseen earlier during development?

The thing is, this is entirely normal. It’s no less frustrating. But it’s normal. However, there are small, practical things we can do to our code throughout development or during maintenance.

And that’s part of the problem that we often face, isn’t it? There are things we know we can do but the amount of time it takes to do them is often incompatible with our deadlines.

So what can we do?

One Step Towards Dependency Injection in WordPress

August 25, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Dependency Injection is one of those programmer-y terms that sounds far more complicated than it is.

As defined in Wikipedia:

Dependency injection allows a program design to follow the dependency inversion principle. The client delegates to external code (the injector) the responsibility of providing its dependencies.

The client is not allowed to call the injector code. It is the injecting code that constructs the services and calls the client to inject them. This means the client code does not need to know about the injecting code.

But think about it like this (because if you’ve used object-oriented programming, you’ve no doubt done something like this):

You have a class, say Class A that maintains a reference to another class, Class B.
In the constructor for Class A, we instantiate Class B and set it equal to a property.

Easy enough, right? Here’s the implication:

Class A now has a dependency on Class B and that dependency is only set during the instantiation process in the constructor of Class A.

On a small scale, this isn’t that big of a deal but as a plugin or an application gets more and more complicated, there are all of these dependencies set in the system without any way to necessarily test them in isolation.

And don’t get me wrong: There should be some cohesion among objects in an application, but the degree to which they are coupled should be small. There are a lot of reasons for this many of which are outside the scope of this post.

To help mitigate this, programmers have created all kinds of strategies to make sure that our classes can be small and focused and tested in isolation all the while working with other parts of the system.

And one of the most popular ways to do this is through dependency injection. But what does dependency injection in WordPress look like (and is it any different than in other applications)?

Understanding WordPress Hooks

August 24, 2016 / Tom

WordPress hooks are arguably the foundational topic that developers need to learn and understand when it comes to building more advanced functionality for WordPress.

WordPress Hooks

Yes, you can build an entire theme primarily with markup, styles, and JavaScript. Though you may need a few server-side functions in PHP, it’s easy to find things like this in the WordPress Codex or in Underscores.me.

But if you’re someone who’s new to WordPress or who is ready to take the next step regarding extending the platform or writing a plugin, then it’s important to understand to know what WordPress hooks are, how they work, and what they’re designed to do.

And that’s what I’ve covered in my latest series on Envato.