Category: Articles (Page 158 of 258)

Occasionally, I’ll get questions about how I handle what it’s like working from home and running a business all the while having my family at home during the day (my kids are both three and one so they aren’t quite at school age yet).

The obligatory family shot. Sort of.

So though this has nothing to do with development and has more to do with how I get things done, I thought it would be worth sharing within the context of a blog post so I’d have something to refer to others later in terms of how I manage my environment and my time when it comes to working out of the home full-time.

Continue reading

When working on software development projects, there are certain things that I think every project needs. Sure, each project is different so there’s definitely a difference among projects, but in my experience there are a few things that are crucial to both managing a project and completing a project.

Honestly, when it comes to writing posts like these, I think our natural tendency is to do so from the perspective of a freelancer or someone who may be subcontracted or self-employed.

Though I tend to fit in the latter camp, I’ve found that the following tends to be true regardless of where you work – be it a big corporation, a small team, or even on your own.

Continue reading

There have been times where I’ve considered pulling code down from the WordPress plugin repository or from GitHub because the way in which I write my code now differs from how I wrote my code when I was working on those projects.

And surely you know what I’m talking about: It’s not that the plugins don’t work and it’s not that they necessarily cause problems for anyone, but the open source nature of what they don’t necessarily represent what we’re capable of doing now or how we’re capable of doing it now.

Does that make sense?

Continue reading

Earlier this week, I wrote a post about how we use the term “WordPress Admin,” how I suspect that we’re using it incorrectly, and I discussed the significance and importance of consistency of terminology when working with customers and clients.

The post generated far more discussion than I would have expected, which is a good thing, but one particular comment struck a chord with me:

Tom,

I sent a Jr. level WP developer through your TutsPlus course on plugin development. You use the word “Admin” more times than I could count! You even use it for file names, etc.

What’s up with that, brother? I respect you so I had to chime in with that lil’ observation.

I love comments like this because not only does it hold us accountable to our own actions, but it also gives us an opportunity to show that throughout the course of whatever it is that we’re doing now may not what we’re doing tomorrow.

Continue reading