Category: Articles (Page 195 of 258)

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

Some Thoughts on Why You Need a Team

May 29, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This is the first post in a series about my thoughts an experience in building a team.

Posts that normally talk about teams usually discuss the importance of going further, faster, team dynamics, people leading in their core areas of competence, and often come back to some form of leadership.

I think that all of that is right and all of that is good and valuable, but when it comes to talking about a team when building some type of software project, I think that the articles and conversations are usually oriented around the ideas and challenges of building a company, or to help build something for the long term.

But there are other types of teams, and they are just as valuable as those that help make up a development team, testing team, a startup team, or so on, they just don’t necessarily fit the traditional mold.

And because of that, these are the types of teams that are normally talked about. As such, I thought it might be worth sharing a few thoughts on why you need a team especially in a non-standard context through my own personal experience.

Three Thoughts About Marketing WordPress.com Themes

May 28, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For the last few months now, I’ve been selling Mayer exclusively on WordPress.com and I’ve really enjoyed it.

The thing is, for those that have kept up with the work I’ve been doing with WordPress over the past few years, you know that I’ve been involved in the development of several different themes (and still am, but more on that later).

The Mayer Demo on WordPress.com

But in working exclusively with the marketplace, there have been a number of questions that I’ve been thinking about as it relates to marketing WordPress.com themes.

Generally speaking, I don’t have answers to these, though I’m happy to share my thoughts; however, I’m definitely interested in hearing your thoughts and opinions as well.

WordPress at the Risk of First Impressions

May 27, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

The more time anyone spends with WordPress and all associated products (that is, themes, plugins, and so on), the more likely they are to also pick up on all of the commentary – both good, bad, and neutral – that surrounds the core application.

Obviously, I’m a fan of WordPress and make my living building things for it and trying to give back to the core application when I can so I know that what I’m going to say is going to come off as biased just as anyone else who writes about their preferred technology stack.

I’m well aware of the common complaints people have about the WordPress codebase and I’m not here to defend, to make statements about how it’s getting better, or to spark a discussion on how hard it is to maintain legacy features for a decade.

But if you’re a developer who is just getting into WordPress – specifically, products built on top of it – then I think that a significant portion of your first impression has to do with your experience on the first product that you use.

Scope Creep: Constraints, Products, and Time

May 24, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Regardless of the type of project you’re working on – being side projects, freelance projects, or corporate projects – one of the things that plagues businesses the most is scope creep.

To be clear, this is not an indictment of any one party – this is something that affects anyone and everyone who is working on a product.

Look at it this way:

For side projects, we convince ourselves that adding just one more feature will make it all the better than it is in the current state never mind the fact that you can continue to work on this as your time permits.
For freelance projects, we either take the route of convincing our customer than this will be one more thing to enhance the experience, or the customer asks for just one more thing in order to “take it to the next level” never minding the idea that there is time, budgets, and constraints involved.
For corporate projects, this may vary widely but it can go anywhere from upper-management saying that feature-X should be implemented in order to stay competitive, or it can come from a major third-party client who has the money to fund the quick turn around of a feature.

The reason that I believe this is important is two fold:

Products should have lifetimes.
Time is our most valuable resource.

Nothing novel, is it?

Robert Herjavec, Success, and WordPress

May 23, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Several months ago, I stumbled across this video featuring Robert Herjavec (most notably from Shark Tank these days), and there were a number of things he said in the video that resonated with me.

I wanted to share it because not only do I think it’s worth a watch, but because I also think there are a number things that’ll resonate with many of you, as well:

Whenever I watch videos like this, one of the hardest things to do is to distill some of my favorite quotes into a single post, but in an effort to do just that, I thought I’d share some of the ones I like and how they relate to what I – and many of you – do for a living (or for a hobby), and then just list the rest as ones that I also enjoyed.