Author: Tom (Page 194 of 428)

Using Terminal in Coda 2

October 14, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Most developers in the WordPress space have their favorite IDE of choice. Ask around and you’re likely to hear people share their favorite editors being:

And these are all great options. For what it’s worth, I dig the fact that we have choices when it comes to the tools with which we work.

But I’ve been a fan of Coda ever since I moved to Mac. This doesn’t mean it’s not without its shortcomings. For example, I use a third-party application to do debugging but it’s not that big of a deal.

Terminal in Coda 2

Anyway, one of the things that I’ve noticed with people who opt to use Coda don’t use it to its fullest extent. That is, there are a lot of features I see other developers opt not to use (like the database front-end).

I don’t know if it’s because they don’t know it exists or because old habits die hard. Either way, another example that I rarely see is the terminal in Coda 2.

Showing Poor Source Code

October 13, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

The act of showing poor source code either via our blogs or our open repositories can be a scary thing. I mean, we’re putting out for others to read and critique that we’ve worked hard to complete.

Sometimes we do it thinking that we’re on the right track; sometimes we do it when we’re asking for it.

Writing

In the latter case, I’d say that it’s not so scary – we’re asking for critique. In the former, isn’t it a bit more challenging when we get that criticism?

That is, isn’t it harder to deal with the criticism that comes on to something we thought we were doing right?

Of course. Does that mean we should stop sharing our code? No way.

Tips For Daily Blogging (And How To Garner Blog Post Ideas)

October 12, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Like anyone who blogs are regular intervals, be it a few times a week to daily, I’m asked how I write daily. In short, I wish I had a simple recipe to explain how to do it.

But I think this is something unique to every person.

Sure, I think people should write daily even if they aren’t publishing their content on a blog. I believe something happens when you articulate your thoughts via the written word.

You become better at thinking through some of your own opinions.
You get better at presenting ideas to other people even if they will result in a debate.
You reason through your own convictions for why you feel the way you do about a given topic.

Sure, this sounds a little silly when talking about writing about development. It’s not, though.

Our field is one that’s built on the idea of logic and having things work in a logical and efficient manner. It’s important to make sure that our reasons for why we do the things we do have been reasons through, as well.

But I’ll talk more on that in a moment.

Instead, back to the original question: How does one get into the habit of daily blogging?

Using Third-Party Code Is Not Immature

October 9, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One aspect of growing in a career in development is knowing when to write your own code and when to use the work of others.

So many libraries available via others work.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but when we start out it’s like we want to roll everything on our own. I don’t know if it’s because we want to prove to our employer, our clients, or ourselves we can do it. Maybe it’s a mix of the two or maybe we just welcome the challenge.

Maybe it’s all the above.

Whatever the case, we’ll eventually work on larger projects and eventually become more specialized. That is, we’ll identify what we need to write and where we can use an existing library.

Quick Tip: An Alternative To file_get_contents

October 8, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the more common PHP functions developers use in order to make remote requests is file_get_contents. The function makes it easy to send requests to another URL and then handle the response.

It’s especially handy if you need to make an Ajax request to another site but aren’t allowed to do so from the client-side because of cross-site-scripting.

That said, cURL is often a better option than file_get_contents because it gives you far more control over the options that are set when setting up the request to be made. file_get_contents simply doesn’t do that. Instead, it provides enough options for making simple GET requests.

No, not that kind of curl.

For these reasons, it’s often a good idea to use cURL when you need to provide a more fine-tuned request. Even more so, it’s helpful to have all of the functionality wrapped up in a utility function you can drop in your project whenever you need it.