Author: Jonathan
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Things I’ve been working on lately – part 1
Managesite scripts Over the course of the past 4 years I’ve experimented with a bunch of different local development environments for my freelance client work. I started with Scotch Box, transitioned to Boss Box, and finally back to bare bones LAMP, mostly because I develop on Ubuntu and I find Apache2 to be an easier…
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Beginners guide to testing your Laravel application
Last night I presented my talk on getting started with testing in Laravel at the Developer User Group in Cape Town. These are the slides for this talk.
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How much should I charge as a freelancer/freelance developer?
This question, along with “How do I find clients/work?”, is probably the question I get asked the most from folks starting their freelance journey. And then when I tell them what I charge (or used to charge before I started working full-time at Castos), they respond with shock, as it’s usually triple what they were…
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WP Plugin Tests: planning the course
For personal reasons I don’t tend to publish my year in review or new year goals posts any more. As I start the year, something that I’ve had on my mind since forever was the idea of recording a development related course of some kind. Here are some of the reasons I want to put…
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Thoughts on the last 20 years.
As the year comes to a close, and I sit here in the small town of Wilderness, drinking my last beer of 2019, and watching the last fire of 2019 burn down, I contemplate the past 20 years of my life. 20 years ago (at around this time) I was a lost 22 year old,…
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Additions and upgrades
It’s been just over two years since I moved into my current office space, and just over a year since I last wrote about it. As my two major hobbies outside of my work as a developer are jiu-jitsu (which not many folks can relate to), and computer hardware and peripheral upgrades (which most can…
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A beginners guide to testing your existing Laravel application
Last night I gave a talk at the Cape Town PHP Meetup introducing the concepts of testing an existing Laravel application. As I did not have time to prepare slides, here are the links to the relevant items I discussed in the talk. Confident Laravel (course, highly recommended) Grumpy Learning (course and books, also recommended)…
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Taking a break from my WordPress community activities
It’s a funny old world. Over the course of the past few years I’ve seen a lot of people take a step back from contributing to WordPress, and I never thought I would get there. But here I am, writing about taking exactly such a break. When I joined the WordPress community back in early…
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WordPress Plugin Development Best Practices
This morning I presented a workshop at WordCamp Johannesburg. Here are the slides for that workshop Here is the GitHub repository If you want to see the updated plugin code, with the security fixes, you’ll need to switch to the feature/more-secure-plugin branch.
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The Process of Writing
The general recommendation to becoming a better writer, is to write every day. Besides high school creative writing, I am mostly a self taught writer. I’ve never completed any official copy-writing courses, even though I have three purchased on Udemy from about 2 years ago. I generally don’t understand the finer details that would take…
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The two worst things you can say to your freelancer.
I’ve been freelancing full time for just over three years now, having spent 10 years developing for either digital agencies or small to medium sized businesses, in various roles. In the 3+ years since I switched to freelance development, the two sentences that I’ve heard/read the most from clients, and the ones that illicit the…
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A Quick Hack to Writing Testable Code
I’ll be the first to admit that I am fairly inexperienced in the practical application of unit testing, or any kind of automated testing. That’s not to say I don’t understand what these things are. I was first exposed to the concept of unit tests back in 2008 and automated browser testing in around 2012.…