Category: Articles (Page 224 of 256)

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

The Signal and Noise of Developer Maturity

July 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think that for many developers, it’s all too common for them to have heard or even to have said something along the lines: “That’s nice, but I could build that, too” or perhaps go even further and then say “that’s nice, but I could build it better.”

In fact, years ago, the classical example of this was:

I could’ve written Twitter in a weekend.

Surely some of you guys remember that.

Anyway, there’s another thing that’s interesting in the development community and that’s that we’re all taking advantage of the work of others who have come before us.

To use a cliche, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants.

And what I’m getting at has nothing to do with whether or not you could’ve written Twitter in a weekend, but that there are certain signals of developer maturity, and one of the first is recognizing that regardless of whether or not you know when to write it from the ground up, and when you know when to use the work of others.

A Look at the WordPress HTTP API

July 17, 2013 / Tom

Comments on are closed on this post so we can keep the discussion on the original articles.

When it comes to working with WordPress, one of the lesser discussed aspects of the platform is the WordPress HTTP API.

This isn’t to say that people don’t use it – they obviously do – and this isn’t to say that people don’t actually understand it – because I’m sure they do – but I don’t think it’s evangelized or discuss enough.

In fact, it looks as if there’s very few tutorials about the API available on the web. So, to that end, I’ve opted to do a bit of a practical crash course in the API on WPTuts+ over the next few weeks.

Were It Not For The Fear of Criticism

July 17, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Over the past few months, I’ve published several articles about handling negativity and criticism on the Internet. I hesitate to even share another one because I hate to not only beat a dead horse, but to even address something that, y’know, will never go away.

Specifically, I’ve shared:

But in my recent post on WP Explorer, there were a couple of comments that came in at the same time a friend of mine shared a timely article with me.

So for those of you who are beginners, looking to get into WordPress development in any capacity, or who are even the least bit timid about releasing anything to the public for a fear of criticism, know that you’re in good company.

The High Price of Free Plugins

July 16, 2013 / Tom

Comments are closed on this article. Please check out the original article to share your thoughts!

Recently, I had a chance to guest post over at WP Explorer and opted to discuss the high price of free WordPress plugins.

For the most part, the article is aimed at anyone who is looking to get into WordPress plugin development, but isn’t quite sure what to expect. Honestly, it’s one of those “if I knew then what I knew now” kind of scenarios.

Ultimately, I cover a handful of topics – both pros and cons – about what to expect when getting into the game.

Whatever You Do: Keep Calm and Code On

July 15, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I shared an very simple open source plugin for WordPress called Markdown Code For WordPress.

The purpose of the plugin is simple:

I include a variety of snippets in my posts for which I get tired of adding markup every. single. time.

Over time, I’ve added support for just a few more tokens, but the bottom line is that the plugin is written to help make what I do just a little bit easier in my day-to-day.

If others find it useful, great! If not, no big deal, either. It’s available for free and I’ll even take a look at pull requests to see if it fits in the vision for what I want.