When first getting into programming or when first getting involved with a particular language, one of the most common questions new developers ask is:

What’s something I can build?

And it’s a good question, isn’t it? I mean, anyone who is involved in programming has been in that position before: We’ve learned enough of a language to be dangerous, we’ve worked through all of the provided examples, but we’ve got no idea what else to build.

There are some things we can reference for other developers to try and create:

• Take a look at one of your favorite programs and try to recreate it.
• Attempt to create one of your favorite features of a given program.
• Study some open source code from one language and try to recreate it in your language.
• And so on.

All of these examples are fine, but what happens when you’re a little more experience with both a language, a framework or foundation, and you have to work to make something happen, and you’re not quite sure how to do it in code?

That is, you can explain it at a high-level and perhaps even diagram it out on a piece of paper using a data structure or something similar, but you aren’t familiar enough with the core foundation or framework for how to do something.

What do you do then?

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The last two posts have talked specifically about what it’s like to work specifically on refactoring legacy code whether it be something that we’ve previously worked on or something that we’ve inherited from someone else.

• In the first post, I talked about the idea of “leaving the campground cleaner than you found it” which is the Boy Scout rule applied to programming.
• In the second post, I talked about getting a bit reflective about the choices we’ve made as it relates to some of the code we encounter in our work and how it can affect our self-confidence or our ability.

And though I think there’s more than can be said as it relates to this topic (I mean, it has the potential to be a very long discussion, doesn’t it?). I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about what it’s like to try to more modern code on top of what’s essentially a legacy application.

Specifically, I want to share a few thoughts on what it means to write code (that will likely need refactoring at some point) on top of WordPress.

Note: This post ended up being much longer than I anticipated, but I hope you read it in its entirety, enjoy it, and feel free to comment on it, as well.

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