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From Pair Programming To Peer Discussions, Debates, or Whatever

November 7, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think most anyone who has been in some sort of development community for a fair amount of time has least heard of the idea of pair programming.

If not, Wikipedia defines it as:

Pair programming is an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The two programmers switch roles frequently.

The advantage to this is that you’ve got two people working on a single component of an application which should ideally result in more robust code because you’re actively having your code reviewed, you have a person able to think about the code being written within the larger context of the application in order to foresee problems, and you have a person that’s actively developing the solution for the given task (be it a bug, feature request, or something else).

And sure, we’ve all been told that it’s a good idea to find a person or a community that has more experience than us so that we may learn from them; however, I don’t think we hear – at least not often enough – that it’s also beneficial to find people of equivalent levels of experience who also think differently about problem solving.

Updating The The WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards

November 6, 2013 / Tom

Comments are closed on this post. Let's keep the discussion on the Make WordPress blog.

Earlier this year, I drafted the first version of the WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards (and I discuss it more in-depth in this post).

When I contributed the first version of the standard, the conventions were based largely on writing vanilla JavaScript, and on the existing WordPress PHP Coding Standards; however, there has recently been a surge of interest in continuing to develop the JavaScript Coding Standards.

Because I obviously have a strong interest in this, because I believe that more and more sites and applications are doing more work on the client-side, and because I want there to continue to improve the existing WordPress codebase, I wanted to make sure that there is about to be a major update to the JavaScript coding standards.

WordPress Fame: The All-Singing, All-Dancing Crap of the World?

November 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Ask anyone who’s involved in the WordPress community – and who has been for sometime – and you’re likely to hear that it’s a great experience not only because of the projects that are being built on and around WordPress, but because of all the people involved in the economy and in the community.

And it’s true: Being a part of the larger WordPress economy and community is exciting.

But, like with anything else, it’s challenging at times. I think that anyone who has stuck around long enough knows that as much we we all want the best for WordPress – I mean, we even enjoy hanging out with our competitors.

On the flip-side, we also get stuck in the typical Internet flame war arguing over what technology should be used for what all the while forgetting some of the larger problems at hand.

We’re only human, so it’s bound to happen, right?

It’s a weird thing, for sure, but it’s the nature of the community – at least for now (and probably for longer, if you’re a cynic) – but that doesn’t mean that you – or anyone else – should be dissuaded or discouraged from becoming a part of it.

But there is something that I’ve noticed in the community, or around the fringes if that’s what you’d like to call it, and sometimes I think people’s desire to be known – or wanting to achieve some type of WordPress fame or notability – outweighs the work, the contributions, and their input into the economy.

And though one could argue there are many problems with that, one of the largest is that the focus is being misplaced for the sake of the individual rather than improving the core product or products around WordPress.

Planning For 2014 WordPress Courses

November 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As we enter the final two months of the year, one of the things that I like to do is take time to look back at some of the things I set out to accomplish in January, evaluate what I’ve done – for better or worse – and then begin making plans for the coming year.

One of the things that I did this year that I really enjoyed was host a course aimed at helping you to improve your WordPress development skills.

Overall, the course had a greater turn out than I was expecting, resulted in some good conversation in our back channel, and also seeded some great ideas for future courses.

So I was continue to ramp up Pressware, one of the things that I’m looking to do next year is to offer more online courses and material for those who want to improve their WordPress development chops in certain areas.

Subscribe For Updates: The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

November 2, 2013 / Tom

With yesterday’s announcement of the latest release of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, I’ve had a number of emails, tweets, and messages how people can stay up to date with the project without having to follow the GitHub repository, or the blog.

Ultimately, I want to make sure that this Boilerplate reaches the largest number of developers both for those who wish to contribute, and for those who wish to use it as a starting place for their projects.

As such, I’ve created an opt-in mailing list to which you can subscribe.

Tom McFarlin