Category: Development
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How to retry Selenium Webdriver tests in Mocha
While working on some functional tests for a hosting provider, I kept running into an issue where the login test was failing due to a 500 error. It appeared as if the site hadn’t been fully provisioned by the time my test was trying to login. Initially, I attempted adding timeouts to give the installation […]
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PHP – Get methods of a class along with arguments
Lately, I’ve been using the command line a lot more often at work. I found two things hard about using the command line to interact with PHP files: Figuring out the require path every time I opened an interactive shell Remember what methods were available in a class and what arguments the method expected The […]
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A Year of Google Maps & Apple Maps
I came across a really great article that compares changes in Google Maps and Apple Maps over a year. It’s really great to see how much Google is experimenting and improving their product. Similar to how a software engineer refactors their code before expanding it, Google has repeatedly refactored the styling of its map as […]
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A developer’s version of a Christmas carol
He's making a database,He's filtering twice SELECT * FROM customers WHERE behaviour = NiceSQL Clause is Coming to town. HT @withoutgorms — Mike K Smith (@MikeKSmith) December 21, 2014
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What I do as a software developer at Automattic
This past Sunday, an 18-year-old who intends on starting at UNT next Fall and majoring in Computer Science explained to me the difference between a computer scientist and a programmer. As he explained it, computer scientists are people who conceptualize software and programmers are the people who merely carry out the plan that the computer […]
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Tired of Vagrant? Try Laravel Valet
I’m always interested in optimizing my dev environment, and after Thomas’s article about Laravel Valet, I’m going to be giving that a try for local WordPress development. I’ve used Vagrant for more than a year now and although it was crashing from time to time, I always managed to get it working again. Not last […]
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The Principles of Design: Font Pairing
I find working with fonts to be one of the most difficult aspects of design. Line height, kerning, font pairing, and everything else is confusing to me. WordPress.com released an article today about font pairing with some great examples of font pairings. While the article is meant for WordPress.com users, the examples of paired fonts […]
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What do programmers do?
One of my coworkers recently shared what I found to a great read about what programmers do. Here are some sections that I liked most: One method for maintaining stability is the maintenance programmer. The longevity of the program is therefore dependent on the capability, comprehension and intelligence of this person. But humans are not […]
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Why should text files end with a newline?
Lately, one of my pet peeves is seeing files that aren’t terminated with a newline. It’s part of our coding standards for Calypso at Automattic and it’s configured into our editors. But, I never knew why until recently. If you’re curious yourself, check out this StackOverflow article. I assume everyone here is familiar with the adage […]
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Scott Belsky on Crafting The First Mile of Product | Design.blog
The best (and most widely adopted) products are mostly accommodating with familiar patterns and rarely “retraining” with something that is entirely new. Only force new behaviors that power a unique value (think Snapchat opening to the Camera while competitive products opened to the feed, etc…). Source: Scott Belsky on Crafting The First Mile of Product […]
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Misconceptions about software roles
I really liked this tweet that I came across earlier. Just because I am a software developer doesn’t mean that I should only write software. I can be active in supporting that software, testing others’ software, and providing input. Misconceptions about software roles: if you're a dev role, doesn't mean you can't do analysis/test/help prioritise […]
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Sanitize array of integers in PHP
I was recently working on a pull request where I wanted to take an array of object IDs and convert that into a string to be used in a SQL statement. But, to prevent potential issues such as SQL injection, I needed to find a way to sanitize the array of integers and make sure […]