Category: Development

Unexpected Practical Applications of Programming Skills

Years ago, I worked in the electronics department of the Kmart in the city where I grew up. I was a young fresh teenager attending college for both Computer Science and Music Theory. Each day I interacted with dozens of customers, coworkers,...

Helpful Packages for Atom Editor

It has been a few months since I’ve transitioned from using Panic’s Coda 2 to using Github’s Atom editor as my main application for working with code. I tried switching to Sublime Text a few times, and never successfully gave it a...

WebDevStudios Dances the Calypso

Recently, Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) released a pure JavaScript version of their website hosting and creation service in the form of a formidable desktop app called Calypso. The new WordPress.com codebase moves WordPress away from MySQL and PHP. It’s built entirely in JavaScript, and...

Why Everyone Should Learn a Little Bit of Code

In my freelance days, I remember sitting on the worn leather seats of my Panera office, listening to the cries of small business owners tell me about how much money they had wasted on the programmers before me. Like a bad couples...

Getting Started with WordPress Hooks

It is well-known that WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems available for building and maintaining a website. While a big part of that success is due to the ease-of-use, another big part of that is the wide variety of...

Writing Clean(er) JavaScript

JavaScript, like many programming languages, has some great ways to compartmentalize and structure code to make it more maintainable, more readable, and more reliable. This post will cover two things that can help developers to organize their code: namespacing and singletons.

Recent Changes to generator-plugin-wp

I last went over the features of generator-plugin-wp in May and a lot has changed since then! There are three more sub-generators (and more on the way), the JavaScript workflow is improved, PHPUnit tests are built in for the main plugin generator and all...

Solving the Responsive Images Problem with WordPress Responsive Images

The quest for a beautiful, responsive website is ever-present. As front-end developers, we know the tricks of the trade when it comes to making all of those fancy little features work from desktop to mobile. Whether it’s degrading hover-based actions gracefully or...

Introducing vv 1.9: The Most Feature-Filled Release Yet

Introducing version 1.9 of vv! In the WordPress world, quite a few developers use Varying Vagrant Vagrants for their local development environments. Just under a year ago, I started building Variable VVV, a tool to help people leverage VVV and make it easier...