Category: Articles (Page 98 of 258)

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

How Good is Good Enough? (Manage The Tension and Ship It)

February 1, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

I was having lunch with some friends and other business owners and developers yesterday, and one of the topics that came up during our discussion was the idea of how good is good enough?

Specifically, whenever you’re working on a software project, when is it Good Enough™ to ship to the customer?

How Good is Good Enough with Coding Standards?

The implication being, of course, that if it’s good enough then it satisfies the requirements, but there’s likely some underlying tension that, given more time, money, or some other resource, we would go back and improve certain aspects of a project.

If you’re a developer or a designer, perhaps you’ve felt this tension. I have. For what it’s worth, I feel it with nearly every single project I on which I work.

And sure, we can debate all day long what it means to be good enough. But I think that the definition changes the further we get into the industry.

Why Keep Using WordPress If You’re Not a Fan?

January 30, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you work with any set of technologies for a long enough period, you’re going to develop a sense of what you love, what you like, what you dislike, and what you hate about it, right?

Honestly, I think this applies to just about anything we do, or we use regardless of if it’s related to our jobs or hobbies or what have you.

At this point, I’ve worked with WordPress long enough to develop a sense of all of that (and it’s not limited to the core application either).

And, to go ahead and be clear, this post is not about the problems that I see with WordPress or with anything tangentially related to it. Nor is it about the things that I think it does well.

Instead, it’s about asking why would anyone – you, me, or anyone else – keep using WordPress if they aren’t a fan of the platform for development?

Sharing Our Programming Problems (Is It Lipstick on a Pig?)

January 26, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

I was recently reading another programmer’s blog post on Coding skills you won’t learn in school in which he was specifically talking about Object Ownership. The topic of the blog post is good in and of itself, and if you’re into lower-level programming, such as C, and data structures, like trees, then it’s worth a read.

Programming Problems: Object Ownership

But just as I was closing the tab, I came across the following paragraph at the bottom of his post:

Broken software, bad job offers: I”m sharing my mistakes so you can avoid them.

In short, it’s an invitation to join his mailing list (which is fine), but what really caught my eye was his call to action:

I’m sharing my mistakes.

For anyone who writes on the web – myself included – I think a lot of us do share our mistakes, but I couldn’t help but think about the way we go about doing it.

And it now has me re-thinking the approach to some of the posts that I’ve written and that I’ve yet to write.

A Bit About Micro.blog (And Why I Backed It)

January 25, 2017 / Tom

In a deviation from the typical type of content I write, I want to share a bit about Micro.blog in case others have yet to hear of it, why I backed it, and what I hope it aims to do for the web.

About Micro.blog: The Kickstarter Page

In short, the whole purpose of Micro.blog is to provide an easy place for people to both write and own their short form content.

From the Kickstarter page shown above:

Today, most writing instead goes into a small number of centralized social networking sites, where you can’t move your content, advertisements and fake news are everywhere, and if one of these sites fails, your content disappears from the internet. Too many sites have gone away and taken our posts and photos with them.

And the service is targeting services Twitter, Facebook, and other similar sites. Don’t get me wrong: I like and use Twitter, but I also know that whatever it is I post there is up to the discretion of the service on if the content persists.

But there’s more to it than that. At the time of this writing, there’s a week to go in the Kickstarter, though it’s far surprised its goal, there are some things about the service I’m excited about and want to share.

Temporary Options in WordPress: Our Best Option?

January 24, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to programming, the idea of temporary values or temporary variables or any way of storing data temporarily in memory isn’t anything new.

But when working with WordPress – which is stateless – we don’t always have that luxury. That is, it’s not simply a matter of, say, throwing something into the current session, reading it, and then removing it when we’re done with it.

And that’s when I’ve been giving more and more thought to the idea of temporary options, for lack of a better term of course. That is, whenever I need to store a value from a single page load, or request, to read in another page load, or another request, I’ll temporarily throw the value into the options table.

Temporary Options: An Exercise and Representation via Rudimentary Sketching

Is that sloppy? Maybe. Do we have a lot of other choices? It depends on how much of modern browser technology we want to use. That’s not the point of this post, though.

The point is that because of the way WordPress works, I wonder if our current, best strategy for maintaining temporary values that is most widely supported across installations is to temporarily add a value into the options table, read it, and then delete it once it’s been retrieved?