In building software – especially at the enterprise level – one phrase that’s used to describe the work that goes into understanding what all needs to make up an application is that of the “problem space” or the “problem domain.”

This is important because part of the process of understanding the problem domain is learning the language, the terminology, and the concepts that go into building an application.

For example, say you’re building a job board. You’re likely to have something like:

• Job Posts
• Resumes
• Recruiters
• Employers
• Employees
• Candidates
• …and so on

These ideas are then taken and ultimately converted into code.

Sometimes, developers will use the terminology associated with the problem domain (and this is part of domain-driven design) in their code; other times, the problem may get solved but the code may not completely reflect the problem space at the code level.

At any rate, one of the things that I see – as designers and/or developers – doing is using terminology that is more frequently associated with how we view WordPress than how users do.

Continue reading

According to Wikipedia, kaizen is defined like so:

Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the best”, refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, business management or any process.

Generally speaking, this is used to talk about the continuous improvement of a product. It’s also a core idea of lean manufacturing that has also been adapted into lean software development.

Anyway, the idea isn’t anything new and I honestly think now, more than ever, more people are familiar with the idea (even if it isn’t practiced) than ever before especially because some applications use the word in the release notes for their application.

Paper By FiftyThree mentions it with nearly every release.

As far as building products is concerned, this is something that I think many designers and developers want to do (if they aren’t already doing it, of course), but it are sometimes hindered by the nature of their environment.

By that, I mean that can we do continuous improvement – that is, can we practice kaizen – on projects that aren’t deployed on any type of particular schedule?

Continue reading

When it comes to selling a theme for both WordPress.com and for self-hosted installations, one of the questions that I find myself asking is:

“Is it worth maintaining two repositories for the same theme?”

And I wonder this because when it comes to maintaining a codebase of a theme on WordPress.com and a version for the self-hosted version of WordPress, you can make the case that there’s no need to have a difference in the version of the themes.

But for anyone who has worked in both variants of WordPress, then you know there’s actually little bit in variation.

Continue reading