Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Balancing Family and Work

Occasionally, I’ll get questions about how I handle what it’s like working from home and running a business all the while having my family at home during the day (my kids are both three and one so they aren’t quite at school age yet).

The obligatory family shot

The obligatory family shot. Sort of.

So though this has nothing to do with development and has more to do with how I get things done, I thought it would be worth sharing within the context of a blog post so I’d have something to refer to others later in terms of how I manage my environment and my time when it comes to working out of the home full-time.

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Things That I Believe Every Project Needs

When working on software development projects, there are certain things that I think every project needs. Sure, each project is different so there’s definitely a difference among projects, but in my experience there are a few things that are crucial to both managing a project and completing a project.

Honestly, when it comes to writing posts like these, I think our natural tendency is to do so from the perspective of a freelancer or someone who may be subcontracted or self-employed.

Though I tend to fit in the latter camp, I’ve found that the following tends to be true regardless of where you work – be it a big corporation, a small team, or even on your own.

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Resources For The WordPress Theme Customizer

With the recent change to WordPress.org requiring themes to use the WordPress Theme Customizer in their work, WordPress designers and developers have been talking about it and discussing it for several weeks now.

And rightly so: Many of us are fans of the customizer, many are not, some fall in between, and some wish that there was a compromise.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s fine (though maybe I’m biased because I tend to be a fan of the Customizer), but whatever the case, this doesn’t change the fact that there’s a lot of education that needs to happen around how to use the API – which isn’t terribly difficult (in comparison, to say, the Settings API) – and how to make the transition over to it.

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Quick Tip: Disable Scroll Zoom in Google Maps

One of the APIs that I find myself working with more and more for a variety of projects is the Google Maps API. Specifically, the Google Maps JavaScript API.

The Google Maps JavaScript API

Though we can do some really cool stuff with it, it’s not my favorite API to work with. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t find it particularly intuitive and it takes me longer to read through the documentation to figure out how to do something that seems as if it should be simple in comparison to some other languages’ documentation.

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Should We Share Old Code?

There have been times where I’ve considered pulling code down from the WordPress plugin repository or from GitHub because the way in which I write my code now differs from how I wrote my code when I was working on those projects.

GitHub Profile

And surely you know what I’m talking about: It’s not that the plugins don’t work and it’s not that they necessarily cause problems for anyone, but the open source nature of what they don’t necessarily represent what we’re capable of doing now or how we’re capable of doing it now.

Does that make sense?

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