Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

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Tips For Being A Productive Developer

I think one of the more popular discussions that comes up among developers (and designers) from time-time is how to be productive as possible. Personally, I’d go as to far as to say that it gets harder and harder each year (let alone each, say, quarter).

By that, I mean we try to use tools such as IRC, Skype, and Slack to mitigate the amount of email that we have, but they also require that we divide our time between focusing on our tasks at hand and then mulitasking between however many other applications are open (such as Twitter, Facebook, email, and whatever else).

I’m not knocking this at all! It just doesn’t work very well for me. Anyway, just as others like to share their tips for how to be productive, I thought I’d share the ways in which I try to achieve developer productivity (because that in and of itself is a challenge enough) rather than, say, general productivity.

So here are a few things that I do – and I’m curious to hear yours, as well.

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A ThemeFuse Theme Giveaway

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Back in December, the team at ThemeFuse was kind enough to offer a giveaway and have offered to do the same again this month.

ThemeFuse Theme Giveaway

Since I try to take advantage of certain opportunities that help benefit those of you who are budding and/or experienced WordPress bloggers, designers, developers, and so on, I thought that it would be a good idea to go ahead and take them up on a second offer.

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Using The WordPress Admin is All Wrong

I could completely be in the minority in what I’m about to say, but when I see phrases such as “The WordPress Admin,” I cringe a little.

Maybe I’m being a bit legalistic, but hear me out: All throughout the backend of WordPress, we see the phrase “Dashboard.” In fact, it’s the first menu item that we see.

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Mayer For WordPress is For Sale

A little over a year ago, I released Mayer For WordPress and have been selling it on WordPress.com ever since.

Mayer For WordPress

For those who are unfamiliar with the theme, it offers the following features:

  • Mobile-ready on all devices
  • `editor-style.css` so that all of the content you write in the Dashboard looks exactly as it will on the front-end
  • Designed specifically for the single-author blog
  • Offers no more options than necessary to get your blog looking at exactly like the demo
  • ..and much more

Not long ago, I placed the theme on GitHub. In fact, for those who have been reading this blog long enough will recall that I used to run it on this site.

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Want a Free Copy of WP Pusher?

Comments are closed as the winners have been selected and emails. Thanks to all who participated!

One of the more popular services that has to come to WordPress within the last year or so is the ability to integrate Git into your theme, plugin, and/or application development workflow.

And why shouldn’t it?

Services like GitHub and Bitbucket are responsible for the rise of Git, has introduced many people to source control (who I wonder if they’d ever use it), and then third-party services have made it possible for other people to connect their repository to another environment and deploy the changes.

It completely cuts out the middle-man of S/FTP and makes sure that we’re able to deploy true changesets of our work so that the code that’s sitting in our staging (or even production) areas are as updated as possible.

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