Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Developer Fitness in 2018: Quarter 3

At this point in the year, it’s evident that I’ve been sharing the things I’m doing outside of sitting at a computer most of the day.

Thus far, I’ve shared:

And if you’ve not read the rest of what I’ve been sharing since last year, you can read them using the following links below:

  1. Developer Fitness: Getting & Staying in Shape
  2. Developer Fitness: More Progress, My Devices, Apps, and What’s Next

As we’re headed into the fourth quarter of the year, it’s the time that I take a look back at what I did this summer and how I stacked up against some of my goals and what I’ve been doing in the past year.

At the end of the previous post in this series, I mentioned:

So that’s the plan for the upcoming quarter. I’m sitting at 179 right now and I’d love to hover around 180 – 185 so if I can stay in that range, I’ll be happy.

I’m extremely interested to see how next month’s challenge pans out. And I’m eager, for those of you who are working to work out, to share your stories, posts, reflections, etc. on your blog, via email, or via Instagram.

With that said, here we go with 65 miles and counting.

So here’s how everything panned out over the course of the summer.

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Live in the Feast Podcast, Season 3

It’s been over a year since I’ve done any public speaking or participated in any podcasts for any significant amount of time. This is large because I was focusing on work and all things outside of it.

But when my friend Jason shot me an email earlier this year if I’d participate in his Live in the Feast podcast, it was an easy decision.

Live in the Feast, Season 3

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Jason for some time over the last couple of years.

We both met on Twitter, though we’ve [regrettably] yet to meet face-to-face, and share a few common interests the least of which is not The Walking Dead (to the point where we had our Slack channel with others for discussing the episode).

But I digress.

In the most recent episode of his podcast, I had a chance to talk about the following:

Blogging, Balancing Work and Family, and Building a Business that Lasts

If you don’t bother to read the rest of this post, you can check out the episode page for more information.

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Working Title: A Question and Answer Podcast with Potential

Last week, I took the entire week off of blogging and all things related to work and social media. My wife and I celebrated ten years of marriage back in April and just had the time to celebrate it at the end of September.

Life happens, right?

Anyway, one of the things that’s interesting about taking time off is that it takes a day or two to really decompress, you know? You have to mentally get out of the mindset of work, of keeping up with your apartment or home and being a parent (if you are a parent).

We spent the majority of the time literally doing nothing but sitting on the beach and reading. But during time at dinner, we’d talk about various things such as our goals for certain things we have planned.

Working Title: On The Beach

And for me, one of the ideas I’ve been toying with for sometime now is the idea of starting a podcast. But the thing that anyone who’s anyone doing a podcast faces are several inevitable questions.

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Quick Tip: Reinstalling Git on macOS Mojave

When it comes to upgrading a an operating system, specifically if you’re on a Mac of any sort, people have mixed feelings. I’ve heard some people say they’ve lost a day’s worth of productivity. I’ve heard others say that the upgrade worked flawlessly.

Reinstalling Git on Mojave

With two very minor hiccups, the upgrade to Mojave has been in the latter camp. Specifically, at the time of this writing, Firefox doesn’t mainly play well with writing to the filesystem via its standard dialog. And my installed of Git was hosed.

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Debugging for WordPress Developers: Stepping Around Code

If you’ve been following along with the series thus far, then you’re likely seeing just how useful proper debugging can be especially when working on WordPress.

That is to say that not only are you able to gain valuable insights into your own projects, but you can see how WordPress core works, too.

Stepping Around Code

At this point, though, we haven’t done much. As you may recall from the previous post (or if you haven’t watched the screencast, now is a good time to do so), you can see just how much debugging offers.

The truth is, we’ve barely scratched the surface. As I mentioned last time, this post and this screencast are going to focus specifically on the following:

In the next post, we’re going to look at more advanced things we can do such as stepping into functions, stepping out of functions, and stepping over functions.

We’re still not at a point where we’re going to worry about changing variable values on-the-fly, but we’re definitely going to see how we can strategically use the debugger to step into certain functions, step over certain functions, and step out of certain functions.

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