Author: Tom (Page 335 of 430)

My Thoughts on Finding The Next Steve Jobs

May 20, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Throughout the year, 8BIT tries to read through several books in order to find the things that can help make us a better team. This past past weekend, I read through Finding The Next Steve Jobs as it was the book that was next in our line-up.

At the end of this post, I’ll share all of the parts that I highlighted while reading the book, but I first want to share my personal takeaways from the material in the book.

Generally speaking, I enjoyed it. It reminded me a lot of Rework in which the book is primarily made up of a number of very small chapters each of which has a single point that it attempts to make. Of course, they’re different books with different tones and it’s not really fair to compare them.

So with that said, I thought I’d go ahead and share some of my personal take aways from the book.

My Day-To-Day: Blog Every Day

May 17, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In recent months, I’ve received a few tweets, questions, and emails asking my strategy for how I blog every day. The truth is that I hesitate to answer this question because I think that so much of being able to do so has to do with each of our personalities.

For example, some of the most creative people I know can’t stand schedules, timelines, certain forms of organization, and what not – simply put, they find inspiration in the chaos.

This isn’t to say that I consider myself creative in the sense that many artists and designers are, but I think that we all have some form of creativity within us, but I digress on this point for now.

On the other hand, I’m one of those that tends to be more rigid with my time management. I try to have guardrails setup for social media, I like making lists, I think there’s something to be said about writing every day even if it’s not blogging, and I tend to “go dark” when I really need to focus on a certain task (and this is true both online and offline – just ask my wife!).

But if I had to generalize some tips on how to blog every day regardless of your personality, it would boil down to the following three points.

PHP Code Formatter For Maintaining Cleaning Source Code

May 16, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the biggest hurdles that I’ve experienced when working with pull requests in some of the projects I have on GitHub is the use of tabs and spaces and how they impact how code appears on the landing page.

Naturally, code should be well-formatted and easy to read not only for those who are simply investigating the project but also who are contributing to it.

Though I’ve shared a few plugins specifically for Coda on how to automate this, but we all use different editors, have different formatting techniques, and so on. The thing is, there’s not much we can do about how others configure their editor.

But here’s the thing: I think that if you’re the one in charge of a project, you have the responsibility of making sure that all merged code is easy to read and easy to manage.

Just as we have linters for various languages, we also have code formatters for different languages. Last week, I discovered PHP Formatter which is a really solid web application that serves as a solid, ahem, PHP code formatter.

Three of My Favorite Coda Plugins For WordPress

May 15, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As I’ve previously mentioned, I use Coda as my IDE for WordPress development. Honestly, it lacks a lot features that I miss about IDE’s like Visual Studio, but I’m a fan of the user interface and have found a number of Coda Plugins for WordPress that make it more a pleasant experience.

To that end, there are a number of plugins that I’ve added to Coda that enhance the overall development experience for WordPress and that I’ve found make it much easier to resolve some of the common problems that arise when writing WordPress-based code while trying to stay true to the coding standards.

An Introduction To Design Patterns in WordPress

May 14, 2013 / Tom

Comments on are closed on this post so we can keep the discussion on the original articles.

When it comes to software development, design patterns are commonplace; however, we don’t often seen them in WordPress development. As such, I thought it would worth covering an introduction to design patterns in WordPress.

Over the course of the month, I’m running a four-part series on Envato that covers Design Patterns in WordPress.