Author: Tom (Page 188 of 428)

The Responsibility of Understanding Your IDE

November 25, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Everyone has their favorite IDE, right? Sometimes it comes from trying out the available options. Other times it comes from the advice of others.

Regardless, you’ve stumbled across your favorite utility for writing code. To that, I think one thing is critically important:

You have to invest time in understanding your IDE and all that it offers.

I bring this up because I see blog posts and tweets in which people promote their favorite editor. Great! Share the love and evangelize. Why not?

At the same time, I’ll see the same people talking about features they didn’t know exist in their editor.

No big deal – these are powerful pieces of software that help us do a lot. Sometimes, features aren’t easy to find.

Then again, we do have manuals and reference material.

And to that, I think it’s important that we, have a responsibility to fully understand our IDE. Especially if we’re going to be as proficient as we’d like with the tools we use.

Eisenhower: Is It Important or Is It Urgent?

November 24, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the most common struggles, frustrations, or challenges that you’re going to face when working for someone or for yourself is trying to decide how to best juggle your workload.

Granted, what’s considered a “workload” may vary from person-to-person, from job-to-job. But for the purposes of this post, I’ll reduce it to a simple definition that I use on a daily basis:

A workload is the amount of work that you set out to achieve each day.

How you go about doing this will vary on your personality types. Some people, like me, are extremely Type-A. We calendar, schedule, and note everything.

And if something comes along to disrupt that schedule we:

Get frustrated,
Try to make it work,
Or find a place during the week in which it will work.

But this only works for so long. The more work that comes your way, the more demands you have on your time.

This is a good problem to have.

But the method outlined above does not work. That is, as they say, “it doesn’t scale.” Sure, it may work at first and it may work for a little while. But when you’re faced with increasing demands on your time, you have to reprioritize what it is that you’re doing.

How do you go about doing that, though? I don’t care if you’re just starting in a career, if you’re employed, if you’re self-employed, if you’re freelancing, or whatever.

Inevitably, assuming that you find some sort of success, this isn’t going to work forever.

So what are we supposed to do?

Source and Distribution Directories in WordPress Development

November 23, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When organizing assets in a project, it’s common to see source and distribution directories. Sometimes these are organized a little different, but they generally serve the same purpose.

Overtime, I’ve moved from one form of organization to another. And I’ve found it to be easier to handle during deployment and maintenance of a project after release.

So here’s a rundown of how I used to organize my files and how I’m currently doing so now.

An Interview with iThemes on Self-Employment

November 20, 2015 / Tom

iThemes is a WordPress-centric company that focuses on providing a suite of tools and themes for bloggers.

Some of these tools include things like BackupBuddy, Exchange, and Sync. From their site:

Since 2008, we’ve been creating WordPress plugins, themes and training for freelancers, marketers, entrepreneurs, designers and developers. We want to take the hassle out of running WordPress websites.

At the beginning of 2015, iThemes launched an effort called WProsper. The goal of of the effort is to help others “do well, do better with WordPress and iThemes.”

A Digression on The State of WordPress

November 19, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

For many of us, we spend our time heads down on projects trying to deliver solutions for a customers. That’s a Good Thing™, as far as I’m concerned.

But every now and then, I think it’s also a Good Thing™ to take stock of where we – as a development community are – where we’re headed, and the things that we’re able to observe about ourselves.

We need to observe where we are (and from where we’ve come).

Now and again, I’ll write about my own opinions about WordPress (the software, the community, the economy, etc.). I don’t always have a direct point, though.

Sometimes it’s just a smattering of thoughts about what I’ve seen. You know, like a digression. And that’s what this post has shaped up to be.