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… Continue reading How much should I charge as a freelancer/freelance developer?
Category: Development
Web development/WordPress/CakePHP
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… Continue reading WP Plugin Tests: planning the course
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)… Continue reading A beginners guide to testing your existing Laravel application
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.
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… Continue reading The two worst things you can say to your freelancer.
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.… Continue reading A Quick Hack to Writing Testable Code
Unit Tests for your WordPress plugin using WP CLI and PHPUnit
Often when I write a blog post, part of the reason I write it is to document things that I tend to forget. This is one of those times. Requirements: PHPUnit: At the time of this writing, WordPress only supports the latest stable 7.x version of PHPUnit, and recommends installing it globally. wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit-7.5.9.phar chmod… Continue reading Unit Tests for your WordPress plugin using WP CLI and PHPUnit
Travelling the web on the WordPress HTTP API
At WordCamp Europe 2019 in Berlin, I was accepted to present a workshop, which was on the WordPress HTTP API. Unfortunately we had some WiFi issues, and not all the attendees were able to complete the workshop. Also, there were some folks who were not able to attend at all, due to the workshop being… Continue reading Travelling the web on the WordPress HTTP API
Some news updates.
I don’t think I completed my year end review for 2018 or wrote a resolution post for 2019. However a bunch of things have happened so far this year, mostly in the past few months. As it’s almost exactly halfway through the year, I thought it might be cool to share them. As one door… Continue reading Some news updates.
Thoughts on Unit Testing
I’ve never been someone who understood the value of unit testing. During my programming studies, when I learned new languages like PHP or JavaScript, unit testing was never a topic that came up. The byproduct of a non university, tertiary education I guess? The first time I discovered unit tests was when I was working… Continue reading Thoughts on Unit Testing