Tag Archives: PDXWP

#pdxwp: Code Review Takes Two

We did a second pass at our code review meetup — last night turned out much better than the first. The high point for me: most of the “presentation” was, in fact, discussion. The latter proved to be way more valuable for everyone, as most of the twenty people in the room don’t do code review on a regular basis.

Here’s what we did:

  • Jeremy Ross submitted a section of code he had been working on, along with instructions on what he wanted feedback on.
  • On Saturday, I reviewed the code. I committed it in one commit to a branch in a private Github repo. On the changeset, I did a line-by-line read-through, commenting as I went. To wrap the review up, I created a pull request explaining how I did the review, what I looked for, and how to interpret my feedback.
  • Saturday night, I prepared a reveal.js presentation with an introduction to code review and the contents of what I found in my review. reveal.js is a super slick tool for preparing a HTML/CSS/JS presentation out of content in Markdown.
  • Jeremy read and considered my review, then updated the presentation with his feedback.
  • I did most of the presentation discussion facilitation, and Jeremy talked through how he received my feedback.

reveal.js doesn’t produce great static slide output, and I used its Markdown feature which requires Grunt to serve, so the bulk of what we covered will forever live on in the outline that follows.
Continue reading “#pdxwp: Code Review Takes Two”

#pdxwp: wp-cli is for WP devs on a deadline

As a part of tonight’s “It’s Tool Time: 4 Tools You Cannot Live Without” meetup, I presented on my beloved wp-cli. wp-cli is a command line interface for WordPress, and a tremendously powerful tool for WordPress developers on a deadline. So powerful, in fact, I wrote my slides as a command 15 minutes before my talk.

Continue reading “#pdxwp: wp-cli is for WP devs on a deadline”

Make your pitch at PDXWP Demo Night

This month for the Portland WordPress Users Group, we’re doing something special: demo night!

To showcase the awesome things happening in our local WordPress community, we’ve decided to give 8 to 10 lucky folks the opportunity to pitch a plugin, theme, project, or history of their business. If it’s not technical, no problem — the only requirements are that it relates to WordPress in some way, you can present it in five minutes or less, and that the other attendees will find it useful, fascinating, humorous, or have some other generally positive reaction.

Want to apply? Fill out our quick survey by April 18th, and we’ll let you know shortly after whether you get picked.

Demo night will be the usual time and place: April 23rd, 6 pm at the US Bancorp Tower conference rooms.

Hope to see you apply!

Upcoming talks: WordCamp Phoenix, PDXWP, and CMA NYC

Over the next couple of months, I’m looking forward to speaking at a few different events.

At WordCamp Phoenix on February 25th, I’m presenting “Mastering WordPress Development.” The title lends itself to a number of discussion topics, possibly including coding standards, how to perform migrations, writing bin scripts to manipulate lots of data, participating in open source projects, how to review your code, common mistakes we see at WordPress.com VIP, etc. If you have opinions as to what I should cover, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

On February 27th, Mike Bijon and I will be taking the Portland WordPress Users Group through using Git (and SVN) for version control and working within a team.

At CMA NYC March 18th through 20th, I’ll be leading three sessions (one per day):

  • “I Want To Learn WordPress – An Introduction To Key Concepts” – All of the basics you need to get started, including the WordPress interface and key concepts like themes, plugins, PHP and MySQL, and how to choose a good web host and design for your site.
  • “Hacking WordPress In The Newsroom” – How to take your WordPress development to the next level. We’ll review version control, coding standards, performance and optimization, debugging, and other best practices.
  • “Making The Switch To WordPress” – Everything you need to know about switching to WordPress from CMS X. Well, most everything.

Shaun, Erica, and I will also be hosting a mini-Happiness Bar for a few hours on Monday to help attendees with all of their WordPress questions.

Sweet!