A coworker of mine took a new gig last week. One with increased responsibilities and a job title bump that put them into a more senior position as a company about the size of PMG or smaller. I gave him three pieces of advice. 1. Do Code Review, Not Style Review Worrying about coding style… Continue reading Three Pieces of Advice for New Senior Developers
The past week I've been doing some training at PMG around our AWS setup and infrastructure. In the past year we've become heavy users of Docker and Amazon's Elastic Container Service as well as moving more towards infrastructure as code with terraform. My team, understandably, feels a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of our AWS… Continue reading AWS’ Minimum Level of Complexity
Sometimes a plugin or theme needs a new page in the admin area, this is post will explain how to do this. There are a number of functions that can be called to make this happen, but they all use add_menu_page or add_submenu_page. Want to see how this all fits together? The code is on… Continue reading How to Add WordPress Admin Pages
When WordPress fires up one of the steps along the way is looking for and loading plugins. This happens before the current theme is loaded and after most of the core and must-use plugins are loaded and setup. This process can be seen in wp-settings.php. The gist is that the plugin file is simply loaded… Continue reading How to Bootstrap a WordPress Plugin
With applications or libraries its easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. It's easy to get lost in the details and forget the broad strokes of what the applicaiton or library or module is trying to accomplish. If that's true for the authors of said application or library, imagine how a user… Continue reading My Favorite Type of Documentation
A test double is an object or function that behaves like a real piece of code, but is, instead, solely for a test. It mimics the functionality of something, without being that something. There are plenty of frameworks to deal with test doubles in JavaScript (like sinon), but it's helpful to the various types of… Continue reading Building Your Own (JavaScript) Test Doubles
The first type of interesting problem is the one everyone talks about: novel problems. New stuff, stuff that hasn't been tackled before -- either by the person doing it or the world as a whole. These are interesting for obvious reasons: it's fun to experiment -- to try new things and push both individual and… Continue reading The Two Types of Interesting Problems
