Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
Since working in software, one of the things that I’ve yet to actually get used to is how quickly people want things delivered.
But I’m not saying this as someone who has built things for others, but also as someone who enjoys using things other people have built, and as someone who cares deeply about trying to get better at what I do for a living.
The bottom line is that development takes time, and good development takes even more time, but neither of the statements are completely one-sided.
For anyone that’s maintained blog for any length of time, you’ve likely hit a point where you’ve changed the format of your blog, changed the content of your blog, changed the way you write, or simply gotten better at actually publishing content.
And if any of the above are you true, it’s likely that you’ve had to determine whether or not you want to go back and work through the process of updating old blog posts or leave them as they are.
Depending on how long you’ve been blogging, this could be a huge task; for others, it may not take more than a couple of hours.
When it comes to embedding source code into posts, I’ve been a fan of the SyntaxHighlighter plugin by Alex Mills for a long time – I’ve used it on every programming blog that I’ve maintained for as long as I can remember.
But ever since GitHub rolled out Gists, I’ve been using those to store frequently used functions, examples of code for posts or other articles, and snippets for which I’d like to have others come in introduce their changes, and/or their comments.
Straight from the Gist homepage:
Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are Git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable from Git.
Easy enough, right?
Perhaps one of the cooler things about gists is that they can be embedded in WordPress posts; however, I’ve had mixed success with the native support in doing that.
But Michael Novotny’s WP Gist plugin makes it really easy to embed nice-looking, gist-specific code into a WordPress post.
Periodically, I’m asked the question:
Should I learn JavaScript or jQuery first?
Last month, I wrote about my two favorite JavaScript books, and though I considered answering that question in the post, it seemed a bit off topic – at least that day.
So why not take the opportunity to cover it in a post of its own?
About a year and a half ago, I released the first version of Single Post Message for WordPress which is a simple plugin specifically for adding a notification at the top of the bottom of a given post.
For whatever it’s worth, it’s one of the plugins I’ve enjoyed creating the most not only because it scratched my own itch, but also because it’s an extremely lean, focused plugin that aims to solve exactly one problem.
The other day, Pippin William tweeted the following:
Good plugin idea for someone: add metabox to edit screen that allows notes to be entered and displayed just above comment form for that post
— Pippin Williamson (@pippinsplugins) September 28, 2013
To which Japh Thomson replied:
@pippinsplugins Sounds like a feature request for @tommcfarlin’s “Single Post Message” plugin: http://t.co/boCu7LdmSO
— Japh (@Japh) September 29, 2013
And to which Andrew Norcross built and responded with:
https://twitter.com/norcross/status/384463729578225664
You can read the entire conversation, but there are three things that I really dig about this particular exchange and the plugin that came out of it. But before discussing those, I think its worth checking out the WP Comment Notes plugin itself.
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