Category: Development
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What is a Developer Educator for an open-source project?
This post is the first in a series on exploring my role as a developer educator in an open-source project. To read more of the posts in this series, check out the developer educator tag archive, or subscribe for updates at the bottom of this post. Lately, whenever folks ask me to introduce myself, and…
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The VSCode extensions I use to make it more like PhpStorm
I’ve been using PhpStorm for about ten years now. Before that, I used Zend Studio, and before that I used Netbeans. I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that I was a Windows application programmer before I switched to web development, so I’ve always preferred feature-full IDEs to lightweight code editors…
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Please take the state of WordPress developer tools survey
Update: The survey is now closed, and I will be publishing the results next week the results have been published. In my work as a sponsored contributor to Learn WordPress, I often need to consider the environment that developers are working on. Are they using macOS, Windows, or a Linux distro? Do they use a…
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Introducing Sendig – a new WordPress block theme
It all started, as most things do, with an idea. When I joined Automattic as a developer educator in May 2022, members of the WordPress Training Team had been working on a block theme developers course for Learn WordPress. I joined those efforts and ultimately that course turned into three different courses that we published…
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Developing WordPress Blocks without React
One of the most common complaints I hear from long term WordPress developers boils down to the fact that to develop blocks for the WordPress Block Editor, you need to set up the JavaScript development environment (Node.js + npm + @wordpress/scripts) in order to start building blocks. This is not entirely true, as it is…
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Running Different PHP Versions with Apache on Ubuntu
I’ve been using Apache as my default local development web server since I started writing PHP code back in 2006. Back then, Nginx was barely 2 years old, and every web server was running Apache, so it just made sense. Over the years I’ve come to prefer Nginx on my web servers, but I still…
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Let’s code! Creating your first WordPress Plugin
As part of my sponsored work for the WordPress Training Team, I’m hosting weekly “Let’s Code” Online Workshops for Learn WordPress. Each week I cover a WordPress development concept. I’m sharing them here as well so that if anyone has questions they can ask me here (in the comments) directly. Watch this video on WordPress.tv…
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Coding Words
The slides from my https://www.devconf.co.za/ 2022 talk. If you’d like to get early access to the book I’m writing on this topic, please fill in this Google form.
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What Does a Better Notification System for WordPress Actually Look Like?
Last week I had the opportunity to join some amazing WordPress folks to talk about WordPress notifications. In that chat I mentioned that one of my biggest “hurdles” is getting the word out about WP Notify, sharing what the team has been working on, and what we envision for notifications in WordPress. And then it…
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From Digital Ocean App Platform to Self Hosted SpinupWP Managed VPS
Earlier this year, I threw together a silly little joke app built on Laravel in a couple of hours. I had merely wanted to participate in the Digital Ocean App Platform Hackathon and had no further plans for the app. Another App Platform Hackathon participant liked it enough to contribute some substantial improvements, including a…
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How Taking the 16 Personalities Test Helped Me Understand Myself Better
For the past three years, I have been having some serious thoughts about my future as a software developer. Since I turned 40 in 2017, I’ve been wondering if the path I was on was the right one for me. This led to a lot of frustration in my work, especially when it came to…
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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…