Category: Experiences
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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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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.…
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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…
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The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.
Today, I turned 42. If you’re a fan of sci-fi, specifically Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, you’ll understand both the importance of this number, and the reference in the title. I do think it’s sort of apt that the number 42 was used in this context. When I hit 40 I felt good…
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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…
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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…
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The Clear View – Get the MOST from your freelance developer
Have a clear understanding of your project requirements to ensure you get the most out of your freelance developer The purpose of this post is to ensure that you know precisely what you need to do in order to get the most out of the freelance developer you’re about to hire. You need a complete…
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Setting up Trusted SSL Certificates for Local Development, Using mkcert on Ubuntu 18.04 with Apache.
One of the many little annoyances that I encounter while working on client sites, is when the client has a valid SSL certificate installed on their server, but the HTTPS redirection happens in code instead of at the server level. This means that even if I export the database with the site urls replaced to…