Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.
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
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.
Source code – let alone WordPress code comments – is one of those things that often divide developers:
In my latest series on Envato, I discuss a case for WordPress code comments on both the server-side and the client side.
One of the things that makes developing for WordPress so fun is the nature of its extensibility through plugins. When it comes to WordPress plugin programming, there are actually two ways that you can write your plugins:
In the lastest series running on Envato, Stephen Harris and I provide an in-depth discussion on both of these strategies.
Ever since smartphones have become mainstream, there are apps for almost everything. Prior to this revolution (if that’s what you’d like to call it), we had phones that a had a few [weak] tools on them, but most of our work was done on a computer.
And the computer had software, or computer programs, or applications – whatever you’d like to call them – and that’s how we got work done.
This is likely going to make me sound a bit weird, but for the past few months I’ve been periodically asking people how they define an app. Of course, I don’t ask it like that. Instead, it’s goes something more like:
So, hey, what’s an app?
And nine times out of 10, I end up getting the same response:
A little program (or icon, even!) on a phone.
Some people have responded that it’s also something on their tablet. Fair enough.
I definitely attribute this change in vernacular to Apple. After all, they’re the one’s who started the App Store with the vision that people could create an app for anything.
But what is an app?
From a problem-solving standpoint – not even a computing standpoint – I have this idea that almost everything is an app.
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