Category: Articles (Page 125 of 258)

Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.

It’s Not a Sad State of Web Development

June 7, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Like many of you, I use Pocket to file the articles I want to read or bookmark for future reference. Sometimes, I get around to reading them; other times, I never actually come back to them. The latter is a perpetual problem I have to get a handle on, but I digress.

Pocket

For the most part, I try to stick to a single topic of WordPress-related development on this blog. But there are times where I see things tangentially related as it comes to our industry (or even just our part of the industry).

Regarding Pocket, the whole reason I bring this up is that I was just spending time in my account preparing to declare bankruptcy in my set of articles. The goal was to clear out everything that was in there (isn’t that what bankruptcy is?), but I found some other articles that I still want to have available to read and to archive for reference.

But in deleting all of the articles that I found, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern of disappointing article titles and subject matter.

An Embarrassing First Release

June 6, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve talked before about my idea of shipping a “strong 1.0” when it comes to working on projects for yourself or other people but what if that version is an embarrassing first release?

There’s a quote that many of us are familiar with (and that I’ve referenced here before, too):

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you’ve launched too late.

It’s attributed to Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.

I think it’s something that’s good to remember, but sometimes I wonder if we use it as a crutch when shipping something and as a rationalization to cut corners.

Proposed WordPress Employee Benefits

June 1, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Though I don’t run a big WordPress agency or a large WordPress shop or anything like that, I often wonder what would a WordPress employee benefits package look like for those who do run those types of shop.

I’m not talking about the standard run-of-the-mill benefits like insurance, retirement, paternity, vacation, maternity leave, paternity leave, etc. I mean, those are all great – don’t get me wrong – but I’m talking about the kinds of things that businesses could offer to their employees that would help them invest in themselves and their career.

Not only would this benefit the employees, but it could help the company, as well.

Social Media and Curtailing the Thrashing

May 31, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

At a high-level, computers work by taking information that’s frequently accessed on the hard disk and loading it into RAM so that when a running application needs it again, it can access it in RAM rather than from the hard drive itself.

The idea behind this is so that it improves performance and this is why having a lot of memory can often give you increased performance. Today, it’s not uncommon to have 16GB of RAM available in a computer, so the amount of information that can be held in RAM is pretty impressive.

Let’s say that you’re running some intense applications, or you’re working with a demanding application, and you’re exhausting the available RAM. What happens then? At this point, the computer ends up thrashing. Sounds like fun (if you’re at a hard rock concert, maybe), right? But the gist of it is that you end up taking information in RAM, writing it back to disk, and then replacing that data with new data from the disk.

Wikipedia defines it like this:

In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer’s virtual memory subsystem is in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, to the exclusion of most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse greatly.

The emphasis added is my own because it’s ultimately the point I want to bring up as it relates to the rest of this post.

Ignore Coding Standards in PHP CodeSniffer

May 30, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

For as much as I talk about writing code that conforms to the WordPress Coding Standards and for using tools such as PHP CodeSniffer, there are times where I’ve found that you need to silence the errors for the sake of something you’re trying to do.

Case in point:

WordPress uses global variables to maintain certain data structures. As per the coding standards, you should not change the values of global variables.

As a rule of thumb, this is true. But what about in the case where you need to make a modification to the admin menu (which uses a global variable)?