Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Author: Tom (Page 242 of 433)

My Suite of Apps: Dispatch

One of the things about using both OS X and iOS is that I try to make sure that every application that I use on both devices helps me to make sure I’m getting as much stuff done as possible.

That is to say that I want the work that I do on my phone to play nicely with the applications and the work that I do on my laptop and vice versa.

But one place in which I’ve had a hard time in getting things in a suitable state is with email. Regardless of what email strategies, clients, and all that other jazz that I’ve found, I’ve never really dug my workflow.

Until I found Dispatch.

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Improving Time Management By Identifying What We Need vs. What We Want

No one would argue that for those of us who spend the majority of our working day on the Internet that there’s a proverbial firehose of information that we have to keep up with. Some of the things by necessity, some of the things are by desire, but I think that sometimes we convolute the two.

That is to say that sometimes we think we need to keep up with things when in reality we just want to keep up with them. This ends up creating a weird trend where we feel as if we’re missing out on something if we aren’t keeping up with everything.

This makes it tough to stay productive during the work day because we’re not particularly great at multitasking (at least not as good as we’d like to think we are), and our attention is pulled in n-different directions.

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ThemeFuse Giveaway: Hosting, Theme, and Domain

Comments on this post have been closed and the winner has been contacted. Thanks to all who participated!

Every now and then, I try to offer up several giveaways or opportunities that I think will be beneficial and useful to those of you who regularly read this blog.

ThemeFuse

Today, I’m happy to be offering a pretty sweet deal from the team over at ThemeFuse.

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When To Start Contributing To WordPress

One of the points of frustration – or even dismay – that people have when they have a passion for working with WordPress is the fact that they don’t have an opportunity to commit anything to core. Or, rather, they don’t have the time that they wish they had to contribute anything to core.

And it can make you feel a little guilty (though it shouldn’t).

Sure, there are a lot of open source projects that are available many of which will merge a pull request in the same day if you were to offer one, but if you’re someone who uses WordPress daily for blogging, design, and/or development, then you likely have a strong urge to commit a patch to core and to see your name show up in the credits screen.

And no, it’s not for the point of having your name listed as a core contributor or for pride or anything like that, it’s for giving something back to the software that’s given you the ability to make a living, to make a side income, or just to build cool things for cool people.

But the challenge is actually finding the time.

How do you find the time between your day-to-day schedule between work, family, projects, and so on to pour through Trac in order to find something that you’re able to work on, to patch, to submit, and then to hope it gets merged into core?

WordPress Core Trac

WordPress Trac

The easy answer: You make time.

Easy. Just use a black hole like in Interstellar.

Easy. Just use a black hole like in Interstellar.

But, c’mon, is that really a fair answer to give to someone who really does want to give back or who feels a sense of dismay that they aren’t able to do so for whatever circumstances?

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