Category: Articles (Page 218 of 258)

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

Why Good Development Takes Time, Part 1

October 9, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I wrote a short stating that good development takes time in which I basically laid out the idea that we all fall into the category of a producer or a consumer – at least at some point – and that none of us are immune to wanting something good, and wanting it sooner rather than later.

For some, the post was a bit cliche – which is fine :) – but I was also asked a question via Twitter that I thought was deserving of its own set of posts

@tommcfarlin I know your audience is other devs, but I'd love to see a post expanding on *why* good development takes time

— Alex Morrison (@Alex_Morrison) October 7, 2013

And so I know that the answer that I’ll give will obviously be relevant to my experience, but I thought I’d share it anyway, and hope that you guys would also chime in with your own experience and ideas as to why good development takes time.

The Importance of Timing WordPress Functions

October 8, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

After this post was published, Brady Vercher also reminded me of two WordPress-specific functions.

When it comes to working with the WordPress database – or any application that provides an API for data serialization – I try to always stick with the API unless it’s absolutely unavoidable.

For the most part, I tend to favor APIs that provides the necessary functions for reading and writing data, and I generally assume that they have everything built into them that they need in order to make data storage and retrieval as secure and as fast as possible (though I’ve been burned by this assumption before).

In some cases, this is true; in others, not so much.

Case in point: I’ve been working on a large intranet application for someone that’s built on top of WordPress. One component of the application requires the import of a relatively large set of data in CSV format that’s also piped through a third-party plugin.

Unfortunately, there was a bottleneck in the code that was causing timeouts on the remote server.

No matter how high you set PHP’s timeout settings, a third-party script monitor would always kill it first. I’m actually in favor of having these types of monitors running.
Long scripts create a terrible user experience so I wasn’t happy with the performance even when I was able to marginally improve it.
Isolating bottlenecks can be a tedious process, but can seriously pay off if you spend the time to do it.

When I finally located the bottleneck, it was occurring in the third-party plugin.

Good Development Takes Time

October 7, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Since working in software, one of the things that I’ve yet to actually get used to is how quickly people want things delivered.

But I’m not saying this as someone who has built things for others, but also as someone who enjoys using things other people have built, and as someone who cares deeply about trying to get better at what I do for a living.

The bottom line is that development takes time, and good development takes even more time, but neither of the statements are completely one-sided.

My Day-To-Day: Updating Old Blog Posts

October 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For anyone that’s maintained blog for any length of time, you’ve likely hit a point where you’ve changed the format of your blog, changed the content of your blog, changed the way you write, or simply gotten better at actually publishing content.

And if any of the above are you true, it’s likely that you’ve had to determine whether or not you want to go back and work through the process of updating old blog posts or leave them as they are.

Depending on how long you’ve been blogging, this could be a huge task; for others, it may not take more than a couple of hours.

Should I Learn JavaScript or jQuery First?

October 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Periodically, I’m asked the question:

Should I learn JavaScript or jQuery first?

Last month, I wrote about my two favorite JavaScript books, and though I considered answering that question in the post, it seemed a bit off topic – at least that day.

So why not take the opportunity to cover it in a post of its own?