Category: Articles (Page 143 of 258)

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

Working on a Software Development Team

October 28, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Software development is collaborative by nature. If you’re working for a company, regardless of size, you’re obviously working with others.

If you’re working in the world of open source, then you’re working on things that may consist of the largest team of people you’ve ever worked with (and may ever work with).

We’re a little less sweaty and a lot more caffeinated than this team, right?

In either situation, this doesn’t mean that the team dynamic is great, but that’s not the point of this point. For purposes of this post, I’m assuming that you are working with others and it is going well.

At least as well as one could expect, right? Continue reading

Your Annoying Blog Habits (Are Now Mine)

October 27, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Those of us who spend the majority of our workday (or even our entire day) on the web have strong opinions on how certain things should or shouldn’t be.

That is, we have ideas on how things should or shouldn’t work:

Modals are annoying and are of no use.
Mailing lists are generally meant for spam and product upsells.
Retweeting content you’ve already tweeted is redundant and annoying.
…and so on.

And maybe I’m off base in generalizing here. I mean, this is exactly how I viewed certain things for a long time.

But the more I interacted with others who live in a variety of timezones, and the more research I did on topics as it relates to blogging, the more began to second guess my initial opinions.

How Not To Upsell Your Product

October 26, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’m usually not into the whole “call out other applications when they do something I dislike.” That is, unless it’s something that I think is unethical or straight up dangerous or stupid.

We all have our boundaries.

To that end, I won’t be mentioning a specific application in this post. But I’m going to be using one as an example of how not to upsell your product.

Two Reasons For a Changelog

October 23, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

You’ve likely often heard of programmers talking about change logs. Whether you’ve heard good things depends upon the developers with whom you’ve interacted.

At least keep track of it somewhere.

Sometimes, I think we get a little exhausted writing change logs. This ends up manifesting itself in half-baked commit messages or in lack of a changelog.

But if you’re a programmer responsible for leading a project be it as a freelancer or as part of a team, the importance of a changelog should not missed.

Debugging Minified Files in WordPress

October 22, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

As much as I’m a proponent of concatenating and minifying dependencies, it’s not without challenges. Sure, this is includes both stylesheets and JavaScript, but I’m specifically talking about debugging minified files in WordPress.

A minified bug. Get it?

It’s one thing to have your JavaScript files separated and organized in your Development. But when it’s time to deploy to Production, you should be aiming for a few minified files.

For example, say a client contacts you claiming something on their site isn’t working? You load up the site, you check the browser console and see there’s an error in the JavaScript.

Wait. You’ve minified all the files.

So what now?