When I decided that I was going to commit the journey of my career to building solutions on WordPress, I was – at the time – all in. That is to say that HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL were at a place where I could stay involved with all of them and work competently down the stack as needed for whatever it is I was building.

But as both my family [and I] have grown and as WordPress has changed over the past half-decade (let alone decade), that entire perspective has changed.

Not just that, though.

For as long as I’ve been writing on this site, I’ve used a combination of syntax highlighting, GitHub gists, or code or pre tags to help share code relevant to a given post.

But the more technical articles I read and the more that I see we, as an entire industry, start to rely versus utilize tools of Stack Overflow and other sites, the more I wonder how much we really understand what we’re writing (or even care) so long as the end results just works.

This isn’t a commentary on how quickly we should ship something. Instead, it’s about how we solve a given problem while also truly learning what it is that we’re incorporating into our codebase.