Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Articles (Page 212 of 258)

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

Fear The Publish Button (For Your Words and Your Code)

For aspiring bloggers, one of the things that we often hear in podcasts, read on other blogs, and in other articles is “Don’t Fear The ‘Publish’ Button,” or we read “just hit ‘Publish!'”

I get the idea behind that mentality – it’s mainly motivation for saying that nothing you write will ever be perfect, so write, hit publish, and you’ll get better as you go.

Embarrassed By The First Version

Embarrassed By The First Version!

There’s a lot of truth to that – you do get better as you go – but I think that this advice (any advice like it) should be taken with a grain of salt.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if you don’t have some type of healthy fear associated with hitting the publish button, then you may later regret some of the material that you’ve published.

Arguably, there are a lot of parallels in writing a blog post as there are to writing code: Publish too soon, and you have something that isn’t worth reading or using; Wait too long for complete satisfaction and you may never end up releasing anything at all.

Publishing a blog post, just like publishing code, is something for which you should have a healthy fear.

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The CSS Single Responsibility Principle

In software development, there’s this set of principles called the SOLID principles. As with most things in computer science, it’s yet another acronym in which each letter stands for the following:

  • Single-Responsibility
  • Open/Closed
  • Liskov Substitution
  • Interface Segregation
  • Dependency Inversion

Though these ideas are geared towards software engineering and object-oriented design, there’s one principle that I think is relevant to front-end web development (well, actually a few but I digress for now).

Specifically, I think the idea of the single-responsibility principle is applicable to CSS – namely, within the popular LESS and Sass preprocessors.

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On Open Source Entitlements: Users

This post is part two of two on a series of open source entitlement.

In the previous post, I mentioned that working in the world of open source has the potential for others to feel a sense of entitlement. The thing is, I don’t believe that this isn’t limited just to contributors.

Granted, I don’t think those who end up using free and open source software aim to present themselves as being entitled – I mean, they are taking advantage of the software that contributors have made available, right?

But the flip side of this is that users who find themselves working with open source software set expectations that may far exceed the amount for which they paid for the software.

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On Open Source Entitlements: Contributors

This post is part one of two on a series of open source entitlement.

One of the challenges that comes with working with and using open source is the danger for it breed a sense of entitlement.

For the most part, I don’t think those get who involved in open source software aim to become entitled – after all, building open source projects is a labor of love, right?

We spend our time that could be spent doing other things volunteering to work on something that we’re passionate about, and that we believe will help to make the world (or at least a few people’s lives) a bit better.

But the underbelly of this is that people who find themselves involved in open source either as contributors or as users end up acting entitled from time-to-time.

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Should There Be Consistency in Product Landing Page Design?

I’d venture to say that most anyone you ask will say that a product’s landing page design plays one of the most important roles in generating conversions. After all, why else would we have tools and products dedicated solely to studying visitor analytics, data tracking, a/b testing, and so on?

Common sense, right?

Granted, there are certain things that are known to work when building landing pages. That is to say that there are principles that are tried, true, and proven as it relates to creating landing pages for working to sell products to users.

The thing is, all of these principles can be dressed up differently depending on the color scheme, company branding, culture, verbiage, and so on.

With that said – and I’m sure there’s an answer for those of you who are designers, marketers, and/or usability experts who are reading along – how much, if at all, does the consistency of landing page design matter for products that belong to a single brand?

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