Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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When To Start Contributing To WordPress

One of the points of frustration – or even dismay – that people have when they have a passion for working with WordPress is the fact that they don’t have an opportunity to commit anything to core. Or, rather, they don’t have the time that they wish they had to contribute anything to core.

And it can make you feel a little guilty (though it shouldn’t).

Sure, there are a lot of open source projects that are available many of which will merge a pull request in the same day if you were to offer one, but if you’re someone who uses WordPress daily for blogging, design, and/or development, then you likely have a strong urge to commit a patch to core and to see your name show up in the credits screen.

And no, it’s not for the point of having your name listed as a core contributor or for pride or anything like that, it’s for giving something back to the software that’s given you the ability to make a living, to make a side income, or just to build cool things for cool people.

But the challenge is actually finding the time.

How do you find the time between your day-to-day schedule between work, family, projects, and so on to pour through Trac in order to find something that you’re able to work on, to patch, to submit, and then to hope it gets merged into core?

WordPress Core Trac

WordPress Trac

The easy answer: You make time.

Easy. Just use a black hole like in Interstellar.

Easy. Just use a black hole like in Interstellar.

But, c’mon, is that really a fair answer to give to someone who really does want to give back or who feels a sense of dismay that they aren’t able to do so for whatever circumstances?

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My Suite of Apps: Gemini

I’ve mentioned in previous posts in this series that I’m pretty big on how I organize my photos. That is, I use a service for backing them up, and a utility to make sure that they are also stamped with the proper date and time as per the EXIF data.

But another challenge that comes with managing not only photos, but other files such as MP3s (be it music, podcasts, eBooks, documents, and so on) is making sure that you don’t have duplicate files lying around the file system.

To be clear, sometimes you may want the same copy of multiple files. For example, say you buy an album from Hammock and then you drop a couple of tracks from them on a playlist or a, gasp, mix CD, then you wouldn’t want to delete both copies of the files.

In any case, if you’re trying to keep your pictures, documents, MP3s, and other files in as lean as shape as possible, I recommend Gemini for identifying, locating, and removing duplicate files.

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Two Takeaways Regarding LoopConf

Over the past few months, one of the larger items of discussion within the WordPress community is that of LoopConf.

LoopConf

It’s a pretty big deal because it’s the first conference of its size to be focused specifically on WordPress developers – a niché conference, if you will – but perhaps the largest point of discussion around the conference has been the point of pricing.

Interestingly enough, at the same time all of this is happening, the community has also been talking about hosting specialized conferences that cater towards specific areas of WordPress. Whereas WordCamps tend to hit bloggers, beginners, businesses, developers, and designers, some have been talking about conferences that focus specifically on one to maybe two of these types of audiences.

So LoopConf comes around and basically does both: It provides a conference that’s a proof-of-concept for the idea of specialized conferences, and it shows us how the pricing of a conference affects the attendance.

It’s really the perfect time to be hosting this type of event.

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Until Someone Asks Your Opinion

Anyone who spends a lot of time online blogging, tweeting, publicly sharing projects, or at least one of the above has likely, at some point, been asked for advice.

If not, it’s only a matter of time. There’s something about placing your thoughts, opinions, and projects – no matter how good or bad they may be – that gives you some level of credence with whom you interact.

Sure, sometimes you get negative feedback or negative criticism – that’s to be expected – and some times, others give positive feedback or confirmation and though that may not always be expected, it’s always appreciated.

Perhaps the best form of feedback, though, comes in the form of having someone either ask your opinion on something or how you would achieve something in a given programming environment.

There’s something awesome about that (and something a little scary about it, as well).

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