Category: Articles (Page 18 of 258)

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

Using Ray in WordPress Development: Measuring Performance

February 9, 2022 / Tom

TL;DR: Ray makes it easy to start measuring performance of your code both in WordPress and in standalone PHP solutions.

I don’t know if this is something that’s common within WordPress development, but if you’re working on functionality that deals with a lot of files, a batch of operations, or both, then this is something that may be useful.

⚠️ If you’ve not already set up your environment, please read this post and make sure you have the free version of Ray installed.

Digital Minimalism, Update 2: How It’s Ending

January 31, 2022 / Tom

TL;DR: If you’ve read previous posts this month, you new I’ve been applying Cal Newport’s digital detox (covered here and here). For those just looking for the short version, here it is: I don’t have a desire to add much back to my phone and no I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.

In the last post, I gave a pretty long list of how things were feeling about halfway through the experience. In this post, I may recap some of it but the rest of all of this is going to be new.

I’d rather share things that have happened since then, or since the beginning, than rehash anything I’ve already written. So if you’re looking to catch-up, here are the posts:

And now, for the rest of it.

Using Ray in WordPress Development: Debugging Functionality

January 25, 2022 / Tom

TL;DR: Though knowing how to use a debugger is useful, it can be overkill for some of the work that we’re doing. In this article, we’ll look and see what debugging functionality Ray provides and how we can use it when traditional debugging may be overkill.

⚠️ If you’ve not already set up your environment, please read this post and make sure you have the free version of Ray installed.

Using Ray in WordPress Development: Callers and Stack Traces

January 19, 2022 / Tom

TL;DR: Callers and Stack Traces are two indispensable tools for debugging code and Ray makes it simpler than most fully-featured debugging environments. This article covers how to both understand what they are and how to use them.

⚠️ If you’ve not already set up your environment, please read this post and make sure you have the free version of Ray installed.

Digital Minimalism, Update 1: How’s It Going?

January 18, 2022 / Tom

TL;DR: Here’s a brief summary of how I’m doing roughly through the first month of the digital detox from digital minimalism I wrote about at the beginning of the year. For those who haven’t read the article, this is based on the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.