Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.
With my recent sharing of my upcoming rebrand and the sharing of some of the things like premium plugins and my choice of support software, I’ve also been giving thoughts to things like mission statements, vision statements, and more.
Truth be told, I’ve almost always considered that kind of stuff to be related more to larger companies or organizations.
But why?
Why is it not applicable to a freelancer, a small team or a small business?
When it comes to maintaining this site, one of the things that I try to do is stay “on topic.” Looking back through the posts, you see that there are actually very few things that I discuss that aren’t on the topic of development in some capacity.
For what it’s worth, I think having extreme focus on a blog is important. Spreading out too wide dilutes content and leaves you with a mixed-to-no audience.
And that’s why I hesitate sharing some of the stuff like this.
But you know, I’ve always enjoyed seeing what some of my fellow developers are writing and sharing outside of their typical stuff, so I always assume that a post like that now and again doesn’t hurt.
So as I’ve continued to explore Medium and what they’re doing with the service, I wrote a post earlier this week all about music and millennials.
When it comes to coming up with WordPress plugin ideas (or themes or general applications on any platform, for that matter), we all have different ways of going about doing it.
Some of us do it by scratching our own itch, some of us do it by modifying or adjusting an existing project to meet our needs, some of us dream up a random idea, and some of us do all of the above.
But coming up with an idea for a project is only half of it – you’ve also got to determine if your project serves a particular purpose, solves a particular problem, or has a particular use case.
I mean, very few things in this world are created “just because,” right?
Like those of you who are reading this, I’m a big fan of reading other people’s blogs for all of the traditional reasons:
Of course, we all have our preferences for what and who we like to read, but I think that we also have our preferences for the types of topics that we like to read.
Case in point: One of the things that I enjoy reading the most is from people who offer opinions that challenge my own because it gives me food for thought to re-evaluate my own position on any given topic.
Sometime, I end up conceding a point; other times, I end up reaffirming my stance on a position. The thing is, I end up taking a significant amount of time to mull things over, so I rarely end up commenting on the post as soon as I read it.
Then, when I am ready to comment, it’s often too late and the time for the discussion has passed. Sure, sometimes I go back and leave a comment, sometimes I’ll chat with the person on Twitter, and sometimes, I’ll respond in a blog post.
One of the things that I try to make sure that I do at least once a day is listen to podcasts. Honestly, I try to listen to several throughout the day, but it really depends on what all I have going on.
For the most part, I listen to podcasts whenever I’m in the car driving or I’m out on a run. Sure, there are only so many podcasts or so much of a podcast than you can listen to on any given, but this has worked pretty well for me for the past few years.
On top of that, I’ve given a number of podcast applications a fair shake and have come away with a favorite. But I’ll cover that in a second.
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