Author: Tom (Page 355 of 430)

Why (And How!) To Use A WordPress Boilerplate

January 30, 2013 / Tom

For those of who you have been reading this blog for a while (thanks, by the way), you know that I work to maintain the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate and the WordPress Widget Boilerplate along with a growing community of developers.

Despite the fact that I’ve promoted them here on the blog, called for others to get involved, and so on, I’ve never actually given a proper tutorial on how to use them to get started in your projects.

So in my lastest series on Envato, I’m making a case for why the matter and how to use them.

Software Craftsmanship: Why This Matters For WordPress

January 30, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I had a fun discussion with Dave Donaldson of Max Foundry about software craftsmanship.

I think it’s worth reading the quick Twitter discussion, but I want to be clear that I mention Dave because the respect him as a developer, and he was being a bit facetious in his comments.

Bottom line, Twitter’s not the point of this post – it’s simply setting the stage.

I’ve written before about WordPress Craftsmanship which generally covers my thoughts on the entire process, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my thoughts on software craftsmanship as a whole and why I think it matters in WordPress.

As such, I thought this may be a good opportunity to do so.

Delivering Products as Self-Employed Software Developer

January 29, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Delivering software is … fun!

When it comes to build a products under contract, one of the most challenging things that developers have to manage – specifically if they’re also serving as project management – is client expectations.

To be clear: outside of 8BIT, I’m also self-employed and spend a portion of my time building WordPress-based products for others. Generally, I build custom plugins and web applications.

Anyway, like anyone that makes the jump to self-employment, it wasn’t with out its share of learning curves.

It’s one thing to talk to people who are somewhat familiar with the web, with software, or with how similar projects work, but it’s a completely different situation to work with people who know what they want but aren’t exactly sure what all it entails.

For what it’s worth, here are three things that I’ve found useful in setting expectations, planning projects, and delivering products as a self-employed software developer.

Do One Thing and Do It Well – But How?

January 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that we – that is, developers and designers – hear more often than not is that plugins should “do one thing and do it well.”

But what does that mean?

I think that it sounds good in theory but I’m not convinced that if you were to ask each developer and/or designer separately what that means, then you’d get a variety of answers.

I think that there’s a reason that we feel this way, but I’m not really sure that we know what it even means.

Static For iPhone – A Short Review and Giveaway

January 25, 2013 / Tom

A good friend of mine recently released Static for iPhone – a really simple application for tracking statistics for various web services.

Straight form the website itself:

Static is the easiest way to view the most important statistics from Twitter, Google Analytics, Instagram, Dribbble, and Github.

As I mentioned in the video above, I’ve been using the application for the past week, and despite expecting not to find it particularly useful, I actually really enjoy using it.

Jayson, the lead developer on the project, has been gracious enough to share several promotional codes to use for the application that I’ll be giving away in this post, but first I wanted to share my thoughts on the application.

Check out my video and several points below: