Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 70 of 428)

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

How to Set a Goal, Part 2: We’re Writing Code

In the first post in this [two-part] series, I talked about the idea of what it means to set a goal. Specifically, I said it was more nuanced than just setting a goal and aiming for it. Instead, I said I thought of doing this:

  1. set a goal,
  2. make a plan.

And, if you read the first, you know that I gave an example outside of programming (because I tend to do that sometimes).

But why not also look at what this would look like regarding programming? I mean, the whole point of the site is to talk about how to handle WordPress development from a practical perspective.

And this seems like something that intersects with that whole idea, right?

Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Tom McFarlin

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑