Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Quick Tip: Selecting a Line Number in Coda

One thing about the output the PHP CodeSniffer is it tells you the line number where your problem exists. This feature has obvious benefits – it lets you know exactly where you need to jump to fix the problem.

Our projects, though, are usually a wide set of files with a lot of functions and thus a lot of lines of code. If you’re proficient with your IDE, then it’s a trivial task to hop to the file and the line number.

But what if you’ve migrated to a new IDE or you’re not sure of the shortcuts that exist in your current IDE? That is, maybe you know how to click to find the feature, but using shortcuts is so much faster, isn’t it?

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The Responsibility of Understanding Your IDE

Everyone has their favorite IDE, right? Sometimes it comes from trying out the available options. Other times it comes from the advice of others.

Regardless, you’ve stumbled across your favorite utility for writing code. To that, I think one thing is critically important:

You have to invest time in understanding your IDE and all that it offers.

I bring this up because I see blog posts and tweets in which people promote their favorite editor. Great! Share the love and evangelize. Why not?

At the same time, I’ll see the same people talking about features they didn’t know exist in their editor.

No big deal – these are powerful pieces of software that help us do a lot. Sometimes, features aren’t easy to find.

Then again, we do have manuals and reference material.

And to that, I think it’s important that we, have a responsibility to fully understand our IDE. Especially if we’re going to be as proficient as we’d like with the tools we use.

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Eisenhower: Is It Important or Is It Urgent?

One of the most common struggles, frustrations, or challenges that you’re going to face when working for someone or for yourself is trying to decide how to best juggle your workload.

Granted, what’s considered a “workload” may vary from person-to-person, from job-to-job. But for the purposes of this post, I’ll reduce it to a simple definition that I use on a daily basis:

A workload is the amount of work that you set out to achieve each day.

How you go about doing this will vary on your personality types. Some people, like me, are extremely Type-A. We calendar, schedule, and note everything.

And if something comes along to disrupt that schedule we:

  • Get frustrated,
  • Try to make it work,
  • Or find a place during the week in which it will work.

But this only works for so long. The more work that comes your way, the more demands you have on your time.

This is a good problem to have.

But the method outlined above does not work. That is, as they say, “it doesn’t scale.” Sure, it may work at first and it may work for a little while. But when you’re faced with increasing demands on your time, you have to reprioritize what it is that you’re doing.

How do you go about doing that, though? I don’t care if you’re just starting in a career, if you’re employed, if you’re self-employed, if you’re freelancing, or whatever.

Inevitably, assuming that you find some sort of success, this isn’t going to work forever.

So what are we supposed to do?

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Source and Distribution Directories in WordPress Development

When organizing assets in a project, it’s common to see source and distribution directories. Sometimes these are organized a little different, but they generally serve the same purpose.

Overtime, I’ve moved from one form of organization to another. And I’ve found it to be easier to handle during deployment and maintenance of a project after release.

So here’s a rundown of how I used to organize my files and how I’m currently doing so now.

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