Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Notes (Page 20 of 49)

Notes on programming-related problems that I’ve encountered while working on various projects.

Merry Christmas!

As is the case with many, Christmas is my favorite time of year. I know that thing in the world don’t stop turning, and things in the world don’t stop happening, but for those who are fortunate to have family and friends close by, it’s a great experience to be able to spend the day with them.

Continue reading

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving

We’re celebrating Thanksgiving today in the United States, so I’m taking a day off of the typical routine.

For those who are also celebrating the holiday, I hope you have a great day hanging out with friends and family and enjoying the food, the naps (well, if you can fit it in), and the general time off.

For those who aren’t celebrating Thanksgiving, I still hope your day is just as awesome (perhaps you can find the time to hang out with some friends or family or get some good food, as well :).

I’ll be resuming my usual posts tomorrow morning. Until then, enjoy the day!

A Quick Tip To Extract Data with RegEx

In a recent project, one of the features that I was working on required that the application make periodic calls to a third-party API in order to retrieve a piece of information to be used later throughout the application.

This piece of data changes over time (though the intervals are irregular) and the end point to which the application connects doesn’t return a standard XML, JSON, or the information in any other standard protocol. Instead, it returns a string of mixed HTML and JavaScript.

The piece of key information is prefixed stored in a JavaScript so it’s easy to get the proverbial bearings from the API’s response, but in terms of grabbing the unique data, it requires some work to extract the data with a regular expression.

Continue reading

Using GitHub Issue Checkboxes

One of the things that I like most about working with issues in the context of GitHub is that you can classify them based on what type of issue. That is, they can be be bugs, enhancements, features, or any other custom label that you opt to display them.

On top of that, GitHub-flavored markdown also makes it easy to to write well-formatted issues and comments on these issues. Over the course of this year, one of the things that I’ve found myself using more and more when filing issues has been using checkboxes to help break issues down into more incremental steps.

Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Tom McFarlin

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑