The immediate aftermath of leaving my job after 7 years.
I quit my job today.
More accurately, I quit my job two weeks ago, and worked out of my two weeks notice today. It’s bittersweet. I know this is the right decision, but at the same time, I invested seven years of my life with this company. And even as I exit, and watch as my existence is temporarily in flux, I still consider myself part of the team.
Part of the family.
They’ll move forward without me, and in a few months I’ll be just another former employee. …
Improving the quality of your code, and the happiness of your clients, should go hand in hand.
The phrase “time is money” is no truer than when doing agency work. Depending on how you’ve structured your contracts, you’re either paid billable hours, or you’re paid by the project.
In my experience, it’s usually some combination of the two. What I’ve seen most is a project fee for an initial launch contract, and then support contract post-launch for billable hours up to a maximum per month.
Does that sound about right? I thought so.
I mention the contracts only to mention what they have in common: Both encourage you to get as much done as quickly as possible…
Even if that application is a script that is 100% procedural, and runs automatically when loaded.
If you’ve ever worked in a legacy codebase, you understand the difficulties that can arise. Some old projects are worse than others, but each presents its own unique challenges. The worst is when that project involves no testing. Updating an old project is difficult in the best of times, but doing so with no testing can be nearly impossible.
But what if that project is what we call “procedural” code?
What is Procedural code?
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to define procedural code as any project that is not broken into functions and cannot be easily modularized.
This is how a…
There isn’t a single software developer alive that doesn’t use tools to get their job done. Whether we’re talking a front end developer using a CSS and JavaScript build tool to compile their TypeScript and SASS, or a C developer using a compiler to build their executable. We use tools because there simply isn’t a way to do what we do without them.
What the majority of us don’t do is build our own tools.
And we really should.
What do you mean by “tooling”?
Well, let’s look at Wikipedia for a second…
A programming tool or software development tool is a computer program that software…
Let’s get this out of the way upfront: I’ll be using Brain Monkey moving forward. If you’re interested in knowing why, keep reading.
What is a Mocking Library?
If you have no idea what a mocking library is, you likely aren’t doing enough testing. Without going into too much detail here, the specific use case that I am looking to solve here is creating a testing suite for WordPress plugins that does not require spinning up the entire WordPress application.
Both of these libraries allow you to “mock” WordPress functionality, which allows you to test your own code in a contained environment. So instead of…
Have you heard the commandment of the unit testing crowds? We must achieve enlightenment. We must achieve 100% code coverage! Any project that does not achieve 100% code coverage is garbage!
It’s an enticing argument. If we accept the logical argument that testing is good for code, then it would seem to follow that more tests covering 100% of our code would be even better, right?
Code coverage is great
It’s true, code coverage is great. It is definitely something that we should strive for. It’s a simple enough argument to make, and it holds true in the majority of circumstances — foreshadowing!
Good…
If you do any open source development in PHP, you are likely to stumble across the need to use multiple PHPUnit versions. This can become a pain quickly.
Do you use the vendor directory?
Vendor-bin?
Is it PHPUnit 7, or can you use PHPUnit 9?
I deal with this issue a lot, as I swap between Laravel and WordPress open source projects, and then the random projects that I like to contribute to. Each seems to have their own PHPUnit needs, and I’m constantly having to look up which version I should be using.
The solution
That’s why I created this BASH…
What would you do to be able to work side by side with the people at the top of your industry? To sit in on their discussions. To have them personally review your work, and provide feedback. All while building software together that makes the world run.
This is an article about open source, but it’s really an article about ego. The problems with open source are the same as the strengths. It is free and open to everyone. Everyone includes some of the greatest minds in computer science — as well as the cockiest minds in computer science.
These…
My last week has been an insane flurry of development on WordPress core, as I attempt to do some code clean up. Part of that was finally installing xDebug and making it work with the WordPress Development environment.
Once I got that working I did what any self respecting developer would do.
I played with it.
I set a breakpoint at the very beginning of the request — first line of index.php — and I clicked step-in until my finger got tired. If you’ve never done this, let me just say…
Don’t.
It’s dreadfully long.
Which I knew, but I…
Have you ever heard the term “Nor’easter?” Growing up in New England, I learned that term early. At 10 years old I learned a new term: Ice Storm.
The Ice Storm of ’98 was without a doubt the worst storm I have personally lived through to date. My home had no power for weeks — plural. We couldn’t travel without risking going off the road. Power poles — not just lines — were laying on the ground, toppled by the weight of the inches-thick ice that coated them from top to bottom.
Ours was one of the lucky families. We…
Travis Weston
Travis Weston is a Full Stack Developer based out of Maine.
