Category: Articles (Page 210 of 258)

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

What I’ve Learned About Open Source Project Management: Milestones

December 27, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

This is part two in a series on What I've Learned About Open Source Project Management.

In this series of posts, I’m discussing a bit about what I’ve learned regarding open source project management, specifically through the context of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.

The thing is, a number of these lessons are relatively commonplace in any team-oriented environment; however, when you’re working in the open source culture with an unofficial distributed team, there are nuances to the work that aren’t always as easy to manage as they are when it comes to running projects in a face-to-face environment.

In the last article, I talked a little bit about vision and mission as they relate to running projects for yourself, for a distributed team, or even potentially for a organization of some type.

This article is going to focus on something that’s all too familiar with respect to software development: milestones.

But just as others have written about content in the past (and will continue to write about it in the future), I think it’s something worth sharing today – at least with respect to my own experience – in open source project management.

What I’ve Learned About Open Source Project Management: Vision and Mission

December 26, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

This is part one in a series on What I've Learned About Open Source Project Management.

When I threw the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate up on GitHub a couple of years ago, it was merely meant to be a place for me to share how I [used to] start off most of my plugin-specific projects.

Sure, it’s changed over time (as things do as we gain more experience), but it’s also grown into something that’s received a number of contributions both of which are around ideas for what should or shouldn’t go into the plugin, as well as a variety of pull requests to solve issues – some defined, some not – all from very generous people.

What started off as a small personal project, has grown into a project – although that I still consider small – has a significant enough level of interest and activity that I’ve had to introduce a little bit of project management into maintaining it.

This was obviously something I never set out to do, but it’s something that’s become necessary. So with that said, I thought I’d do a short series on what I’ve learned about open source project management.

Over the next few posts, I’ll cover an idea or two that I’ve learned – at least thus far – that I believe to be cornerstones in open source project management.

A Strategy To Separate Comments and Pingbacks in WordPress

December 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the luxuries offered by WordPress – in addition to the commenting system – is the ability to know when someone has given us a ping or a trackback by mentioning us through another blog and linking back to a given post.

If you’ve ever developed themes, then you’re familiar with the need to display both comments and trackbacks someone in the single post page; however, sometimes you want to separate the two from one another so not to clutter the discussion.

The WordPress API makes this possible in a couple of ways, but there’s one way that I find myself preferring over the others for which I tend to think lends itself to cleaner code, though I’m interested in your feedback on this.

Using Mixins in CSS: Developer Abuse and Misuse

December 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to the various CSS preprocessors that are available today, I think one of the dangers that we – as developers – face is using certain features that were not previously possible in vanilla CSS as a sort of crutch.

By that, I mean that I think that we have a tendency to fall back on things that we’re used to in our server-side environments as opposed to practices that are more preferential on the client side.

For example, I there are things that we used to do – or should be doing – with class names as opposed to mixins, but may not end up falling back to using mixins as opposed to more general classnames.

Confused?

The Dangers of Blogging (Or “Get a Thicker Skin”)

December 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Arguably, one of the most intimidating things about blogging is knowing that you’re constantly opening yourself up to critique.

For the most part, this isn’t something that’s really all that bad especially when you consider that that you’re offering information up to help others, or to ask others for help in a given situation.

More often than not, I’ve found that people are happy to oblige one way or the other through comments, emails, tweets, and so on.

Unfortunately, you can’t have one without the other.

By that, I mean that every positive comment, every reaffirmation, or every bit of advice offering ways to improve what you’re on saying, you’re likely going to be generating negative feedback and/or criticism from someone.

The thing is, positive feedback usually comes in the form of retweets, shares, and so on.

Negative feedback may be harder to detect unless it’s posted directly in a comment because – for whatever reason – others don’t always mention your handle in tweets, pingbacks, and so on.

On one hand, perhaps ignorance is bliss, but I’m of a different mindset: If you have something negative to say about a person or an idea that they’ve shared (after all, it’s not always personal), then why not bring it to their attention?