Blog
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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.…
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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…
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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…