Category: Articles (Page 244 of 258)

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

My Thoughts on Leading Development in a Startup

January 7, 2013 / Tom

As most of you know, I also spend a significant portion of my time working on Standard, Hello Dolly as well as some other internal projects with my team at 8BIT.

At this point, it’s been several years since we’ve been working together, and as with anything new, there are plenty of lessons learned – some things that work, some things that don’t, and some things that started as experiments and ended up being things that we’ve consistently implemented.

From the perspective of being the developer on the team, one of the biggest hurdles in moving from a typical 9-to-5 to a startup is the responsibility of leading development in a startup.

On today’s post on the 8BIT blog, I share a bit about it. Continue reading

How Do You Vet Your Ideas?

January 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the challenges of working in the development space is being able to separate your good ideas from your bad ideas.

By that, I mean that most of us who enjoy doing what we do probably have a ton of ideas and pet projects that we’d love to get started on, but there always seems to be several hurdles that crop up.

We’re either sidetracked by client work which is good because we need to pay the bills
By existing projects which generally require maintenance
Or by the time that we actually get to work on what we want to do, we’ve convinced ourselves that it isn’t worth doing or we’ve lost the motivation to do it. What is that?

Then again, maybe this is just me – but I doubt it.

How To Customize WordPress Emails

December 17, 2012 / Tom

One of the lesser known features of the API is how to customize WordPress emails.

There are a number a pluggable and extensible functions that make this possible, but they don’t crop up that often in articles, documentation, or in discussion when building products built using WordPress.

In my latest series over on Envato, I attempt to provide more information on exactly this.

Writing Quality Code in WordPress

December 12, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

I recently shared my thoughts on writing clean code within the context of WordPress, but I think there’s a whole other side to this – writing quality code.

Sounds easy enough, but the thing is that if it were easy then everyone would be doing it. And everyone isn’t. In fact, I’d argue that even those of us who try have room to improve.

In my latest article on Envato, I review a few practical tips for writing quality code specifically for WordPress. Continue reading

A Few Thoughts on WordPress Craftsmanship

December 5, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the words that has begun to surface in the software development community in the last few years is craftsman. I attribute this to Uncle Bob Martin, his Clean Code book, and his whole Clean Coder movement (for lack of a better term).

I want to be clear: I love this idea. I’m a fan of Bob Martin and attribute much of the way that I approach software development to him (among a few others).

But a lot of his work is done in the context of the enterprise. That is, he speaks largely to people who are working on large-scale systems for large companies.

Good coding principles transcend their environment though, right?

On top of that, WordPress in an of itself could be considered an enterprise-level application not only considering how widely used it is, but how many large sites it actually powers.

With all of that said, I’ve been thinking a lot about WordPress craftsmanship as it relates to themes, plugins, and applications, and thought I’d share some of them here.