Category: Articles (Page 215 of 258)

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

Overcoming Developer’s Block

November 8, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Every so often, I’ll receive an email or a comment asking how one fights “Developer’s Block.”

Of course, not everyone phrases it or labels it that way, but that’s what it is. In short, people will generally say that they want to work on something or build something, but when they sit down to try to do so, they aren’t sure where to start or what to build.

This isn’t to say that they aren’t capable, but that they’ve simply hit a wall as it relates to figuring out what to build.

No idea.

Stuck.

And I think any developer who has attempted to work on something outside of their 9-to-5 knows this feeling all too well.

From Pair Programming To Peer Discussions, Debates, or Whatever

November 7, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think most anyone who has been in some sort of development community for a fair amount of time has least heard of the idea of pair programming.

If not, Wikipedia defines it as:

Pair programming is an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The two programmers switch roles frequently.

The advantage to this is that you’ve got two people working on a single component of an application which should ideally result in more robust code because you’re actively having your code reviewed, you have a person able to think about the code being written within the larger context of the application in order to foresee problems, and you have a person that’s actively developing the solution for the given task (be it a bug, feature request, or something else).

And sure, we’ve all been told that it’s a good idea to find a person or a community that has more experience than us so that we may learn from them; however, I don’t think we hear – at least not often enough – that it’s also beneficial to find people of equivalent levels of experience who also think differently about problem solving.

Updating The The WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards

November 6, 2013 / Tom

Comments are closed on this post. Let's keep the discussion on the Make WordPress blog.

Earlier this year, I drafted the first version of the WordPress JavaScript Coding Standards (and I discuss it more in-depth in this post).

When I contributed the first version of the standard, the conventions were based largely on writing vanilla JavaScript, and on the existing WordPress PHP Coding Standards; however, there has recently been a surge of interest in continuing to develop the JavaScript Coding Standards.

Because I obviously have a strong interest in this, because I believe that more and more sites and applications are doing more work on the client-side, and because I want there to continue to improve the existing WordPress codebase, I wanted to make sure that there is about to be a major update to the JavaScript coding standards.

WordPress Fame: The All-Singing, All-Dancing Crap of the World?

November 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Ask anyone who’s involved in the WordPress community – and who has been for sometime – and you’re likely to hear that it’s a great experience not only because of the projects that are being built on and around WordPress, but because of all the people involved in the economy and in the community.

And it’s true: Being a part of the larger WordPress economy and community is exciting.

But, like with anything else, it’s challenging at times. I think that anyone who has stuck around long enough knows that as much we we all want the best for WordPress – I mean, we even enjoy hanging out with our competitors.

On the flip-side, we also get stuck in the typical Internet flame war arguing over what technology should be used for what all the while forgetting some of the larger problems at hand.

We’re only human, so it’s bound to happen, right?

It’s a weird thing, for sure, but it’s the nature of the community – at least for now (and probably for longer, if you’re a cynic) – but that doesn’t mean that you – or anyone else – should be dissuaded or discouraged from becoming a part of it.

But there is something that I’ve noticed in the community, or around the fringes if that’s what you’d like to call it, and sometimes I think people’s desire to be known – or wanting to achieve some type of WordPress fame or notability – outweighs the work, the contributions, and their input into the economy.

And though one could argue there are many problems with that, one of the largest is that the focus is being misplaced for the sake of the individual rather than improving the core product or products around WordPress.

The Pressware Shop is Now Open!

November 1, 2013 / Tom

When I set out to rebrand my company and focus specifically on WordPress, one of the things that I wanted to do was also to offer actual, physical stuff for purchase.

You know, what I mean – it’s the typical stuff most companies offer: t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and so on.

As much as I’d love to eventually get to sharing more stuff, I figured it was best to start at the ground-level: Today, I’m proud to announce that The Pressware Shop is now officially open.