Category: Development
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Design Doesn’t Scale
One of our designers shared this post today in Slack, and I found it very interesting. I specifically liked the part about GLUE, because it reminds me of how we component-ize on WordPress.com. And while I’m not a designer, I agree that components have helped with efficiency and consistency. After the visual realignment, it soon…
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Not All Bugs Are Worth Fixing
This is an older post, but still applicable to today’s software development. One of the big takeaways for me is that sometimes it’s OK to have bugs in software. But, not all bugs and not all systems are created equal. Check out the post for an example of Boeing’s bugs. One thing that continually frustrates…
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Do while false in PHP?
I was working on something in Jetpack recently, and was mind-boggled when I came across a do…while( false ) loop. What confused me so much, is why even use the loop if the condition was always false? Not able to figure out what this bit of code did, I brought the issue up to my…
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The craziest bug I have ever seen
One of my coworkers, Alister Scott, recently shared a post on his blog about a crazy bug. I didn’t know what to expect when I first read the post title. But, after reading the post, I am mindblown! If you’ve got a few minutes and are interested in development and software testing, then I’d suggest…
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Preparing for a WordPress Hackathon
This past Friday, I participated in do_action – A hackathon where WordPress community members got together and helped 10 Austin area non-profits with their online presence. This was my first hackathon, and while it went pretty well, I wanted to share a few tips that I think would’ve made me a bit more productive at the hackathon.…
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Prefilling Github Issues
Earlier today, I created an internal “Call for testing” post where I essentially asked other Automatticians to break a piece of functionality that I intend to launch. To help with the testing process, I included a link to a pre-filled Github issue. For the most part, pre-filling the issue with a label, milestone, etc. was…
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High Performance Browser Networking
Today I learned that flushing the HTML document early can improve performance by allowing the browser to fetch resources as soon as possible. Also, if you’re interested in learning more about web performance, High Performance Browser Networking is available to read for free on O’Reilly. The HTML document is parsed incrementally by the browser, which…
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Hacking The Front-End, by Alex Sexton
I found this to be an entertaining ~30 minute video over front-end web security. While I’d heard of XSS and CSRF, I was not aware of a few of the hacks, especially those that include CSS.
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Hack Day: WebdriverIO and Mocha
June 23rd was the second hack day that has occurred since I joined Automattic in July 2014, and the first hack day that I participated in. For this hack day, I chose to figure out something for functional testing since it’s 1) so far been a bit over my head and 2) could prove useful…
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Blank Web Page with PhantomJS and CasperJS
Today, I was attempting to debug an issue where some of our functional tests were not running with the new React powered parts of WordPress.com. As part of the debugging process, I decided to see if the tests would pass when run from my local machine instead of our test server. But, any time I…