Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Resources, Week of 8 August 2021

I don’t have a lot of things to share this week – just some articles and utilities – but if I had to narrow it down to what I’d recommend reading, it’d be the articles on Things 3.14, and the article on incentivizing quality code.

That’s all my comments; on to the list.

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Resources, Week of 1 August 2021

This week, I finally started using a combination of Bio and Hey World to start pulling together all of the content that I share online.

This blog is obviously primarily devoted to software development and although I considered broadening the scope of it (for longer than you may think), it just seemed easier to use another place and have a single landing page for all the feeds, socials, and so on.

Anyway, that’s the personal stuff I have to share for this week. In the mean time, here are the resources that I found interesting.

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Debugging WordPress with Ray, Part 2

TL;DR: Here’s another way to start debugging WordPress with Ray using Composer on a project-specific basis.


Last week, I wrote a brief introduction on Ray, what I like about it, and why I enjoy using it with WordPress. I also gave a brief tutorial on how to use it in your day-to-day but that was it.

Ultimately, I want to cover more about the application from a development and debugging standpoint (as I had some great feedback about it on Twitter – thanks for that!). Before doing so, though, I thought it would be more useful to start with one more tip on how to get started using it.

Namely, how to use Ray with WordPress in a Composer-based workflow.

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Resources, Week of 25 July 2021

Most of the resources and articles I’m sharing this week are the usual type but there are a few, such as original Kindles no longer being able to access the web via 3G, that are an interesting read mainly because I remember when the device came out and that was a specifically killer feature for me.

I also started working on a series on how to use Ray to debug features in WordPress. I cover this later in the article.

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Debugging WordPress with Ray, Part 1

TL;DR: This post gives a high-level overview of what kind of app Ray is and how to set it up for use in WordPress.


For as long as I’ve been involved with WordPress development, I’ve consistently seen developers – myself included – consistently use print_r and var_dump whenever they need to see what’s going on within their code.

And this is okay for smaller data structures like looks at objects, arrays, and so on. Then on the other end of the debugging spectrum, if you need to step through code to see what arguments are being passed into a given function from where and with what value, then using something like Xdebug is incredibly helpful.

Until recently, I didn’t think there was middle ground. But then I found Ray and I’ve been using it ever since.

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