Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays (From 2021 to 2022)

For those who have read this blog for the last few years, you know:

  • I don’t really do retrospective posts for each year,
  • I take the time off for the rest of the year from blogging.

To own dismay, I haven’t blogged regularly this year (but such is life and unforeseen responsibilities 🙂) but the points still remain true.

So as we collectively get ready to end this year (which some people are referring to as 2020, Part 2 🤷🏻‍♂️), here’s to some time offline.

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Advice From What I Know Now

TL;DR: The rest of this stuff is just a short list of other things I would tell my previous self (or maybe someone else just entering the industry) if I were just getting started.


At the beginning of the month, I started writing a few articles rooted in the idea of if I knew then what I knew now as a software developer working in WordPress. And in the first post, I wrote:

So in the next set of posts, I’m going to talk about a few different things that I’d tell my past-self – or The New Class of WordPress Developers – on what to expect or how to process things when working in this industry.

WordPress Then, WordPress Now

If you’ve not read any of the other posts, you can find them all here:

  1. WordPress Then, WordPress Now
  2. Where to Start With WordPress Development?
  3. You Should Write About Your Work
  4. Play By The Rules and Be Careful What You Write
  5. Know Your Strength, Hire Your Weakness

And this will be the last post I write in this series (and if you’ve been subscribing to the podcast, then it’s going to be the last episode for this ‘season’ of episodes).

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Happy Thanksgiving

Despite the fact that I don’t know how many people read this the day it’s published – or that it matters, really – I’ve almost always shared a note of thanks on Thanksgiving Day on this site for just about as long as I’ve been writing on this blog.

Why would I stop this year?

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Installing Valet on macOS with Homebrew

📝 A Note About Notes

Over the years, I’ve written a lot of posts about similar things (if not the same thing). As is the case with software, though, the way we go about doing things can change.

The purpose of posts like this in this category is to start keeping a running list of notes for things I commonly do and how I do them at the time this post is updated.

I don’t know if I’ll update these posts or if I’ll draft new ones. If this one has no “Last Updated” date at the top, then it’s not been updated.


TL:DR: I’ve used a number of different development environments on my local machine over the years and keep coming back to Valet. Here are the notes I use for installing Valet on macOS.

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Know Your Strength, Hire Your Weakness

TL;DR: Though it’s obviously possible to be a full-stack WordPress developer (that is, someone who is capable of working on each level of the stack with complete competency), it’s more common to find people who are stronger in one area than in others.

And if you’re working on a project and know someone who’s stronger in an area than you, it’s often worth partnering with them to complete whatever it is on which you’re working.

But weaknesses aren’t always in the form of knowing a language or an aspect of the application.

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