Tag: 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...

Staging Websites for Safe Development

Imagine you have been evaluating your web presence and have determined that there are tasks you need to work on to improve your website. After careful deliberation, your team has identified points A, B, and C are all either not working, or...

Getting started with Vagrant & VVV for local development

When I started doing web development, I think I started the way a lot of us did. You have a site you want to work on, so you connect with FTP, download a file, modify it, upload it back up, and then...

You Broke It! Better Error Handling So Your Errors Don’t Suck!

There you are. Face illuminated by the blue glow of the monitor. You’ve just finished passing the third of three sets of WP_Query arguments to a function that’s supposed to run a loop with the passed args. Except…arg is what you’re feeling right now because your loop…isn’t...

Don’t Repeat Yourself! How to Create an Author Box Using the Gravatar API

Wouldn’t it be great if the box above could be automatically filled by your Gravatar profile? Tons of services auto-populate your info using Gravatar right? Why can’t my profile information (and social media info) just auto populate in WordPress too!? (NOTE: someone smarter...