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Chrispian H. Burks

coder. maker. writer. photographer.

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 An Introduction To AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) — Smashing Magazine

In this article, Vivek Maskara introduces Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Cloud Development Kit (CDK) which is increasingly becoming a popular tool for managing AWS-based infrastructure. We’ll take a closer look into CDK concepts, and then how to use the AWS CDK toolkit to deploy a sample application to an AWS account.

Filed Under: DevOps  

 
 A Beginner’s Guide to Querying the Slack API | Tom McFarlin

Creating Slack applications can be as time-consuming and complex as writing any other type of application. What if you’re interested in querying the Slack API for your workspace and incorporating the results in a WordPress plugin? Here’s how you can get started.

Filed Under: PHP  

 
 Quick Tip: Programming User Management in WordPress | Tom McFarlin

If you’re programming user management in WordPress there are a number of functions we have the convenience of using on the front-end. If you want to use the same functions in the back-end, though, you’ll need to include some “dependencies.”

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 2021 WordPress Maintenance Survey Results: Key Trends and Takeaways – ManageWP

That’s where our 2021 WordPress Maintenance Survey comes in. We polled a wide range of WordPress professionals who are currently offering maintenance services. These results can help you better understand the current landscape and guide you towards making the best decisions for your business.In this post, we’ll go through seven key trends (in a few different categories) from our 2021 WordPress Maintenance Survey. We’ll analyze the data, and wrap up with some key takeaways. Let’s jump in!

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 Disable Core WordPress Update Notice – Sal Ferrarello

When working on projects, I often want to strictly control the version of WordPress that is running. However sometimes one of the other administrators on the site sees the “WordPress 5.9 is available! Please update now.” message and clicks it, thereby prematurely updating to a newer version of WordPress core. This notice can be disabled.

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 Quick Tip: Programmatically Authenticate a User | Tom McFarlin

TL;DR: Here’s how you can programmatically authenticate a user into WordPress as long as you have a verified user ID for said user.

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 Quick Tip: Find WordPress Users by Metadata | Tom McFarlin

TL;DR: Here’s how you can use SQL to find WordPress users by metadata. This is useful when you have information such as their first name and last name and want to retrieve the full WP_User.

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 Color Palette with ACF custom blocks – Bill Erickson

The core WordPress blocks like button and group all share a global color palette. This saves a lot of time because you don’t have to style many variations of each block – every block with a class of .has-secondary-background-color will have the same background color.

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 Microservice API Patterns: A Language for API Design

In the overall API lifecycle, it is important to first align APIs with business capabilities, turn this into a clear and business-aligned value proposition for the API, and to also produce some API stories that demonstrate how to use that new digital building block.

Filed Under: Backend   PHP   Software Engineering  

 
 Quick Tip: Programmatically Authenticate a User | Tom McFarlin

TL;DR: Here’s how you can programmatically authenticate a user into WordPress as long as you have a verified user ID for said user.

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 Load Classes By Namespace | Tom McFarlin

TL;DR: To dynamically load classes by namespaces in PHP, you need a Registry, and a way to parse the concrete files from a directory based on its namespace.

Filed Under: PHP  

 
 Why You Need An API Gateway To Manage Access To Your APIs

However, as APIs become increasingly crucial for running a business, it's critical to provide reliable and consistent service while protecting APIs from misuse or exploitation. An API gateway provides a layer of security and control essential for protecting your data and keeping your APIs highly available. In this blog post, we'll explore the benefits.

Filed Under: Backend   Software Engineering  

 
 Migrate Docker volume from one Mac OSX host to another | by Ido Berkovich | Medium

I switched over to my project’s directory, ran docker-compose up and expected the magic to happen. My project started just fine except for the fact that the named volume I had in my old machine wasn’t migrated to the new machine. Now what?

Filed Under: DevOps   Local Development  

 
 git reset -hard vs git checkout -f – Sal Ferrarello

git reset –hard vs git checkout -f

Filed Under: Git  

 
 Ray with WordPress Development: Measuring Performance | Tom McFarlin

TL;DR: Ray makes it easy to start measuring performance of your code both in WordPress and in standalone PHP solutions.I don’t know if this is something that’s common within WordPress development, but if you’re working on functionality that deals with a lot of files, a batch of operations, or both, then this is something that may be useful.

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 7 Free Tools To Keep Your WordPress Site Healthy in 2022 – ManageWP

Unlike those greeting cards, we’re going to help you acheive those platitudes with a list of choice tools to keep your site healthy without having to open your wallet.

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 How to build a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions in four simple steps | The GitHub Blog

Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) has long been—and continues to be—the domain of DevOps experts. But with the introduction of native CI/CD to GitHub in 2019 via GitHub Actions, it’s easier than ever to bring CI/CD directly into your workflow right from your repository.

Filed Under: DevOps  

 
 How to Make a Staging Website for WordPress With ManageWP – ManageWP

Creating a staging website for WordPress has many benefits. For instance, you can test any changes before pushing them to your live site. However, it can be challenging to clone your website if you’ve never done it before.

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 Pods 2.8.9 Maintenance Update – Pods Framework

I really like Pods and need to find more reasons to use it. New release is out with several fixes and additions.

Filed Under: WordPress  

 
 Quick Tip: Change PHP Versions with Homebrew on Apple Silicon Powered Macs – WebDevStudios

Homebrew makes managing packages on macOS easy. However, Apple’s new silicon is based on ARM64 architecture. This means that not every package or app can run natively (yet). Thankfully, Rosetta 2 helps bridge the gap by “translating software” so it can run on this new architecture.

I'm getting one of the new M1's for work so I know I'm going to need this. I'm sure other's might too.

Filed Under: PHP  

 
 Writing Better Pull Requests | Blog | Micheal England

Over the last year, I've become more thoughtful about the code I write and how quickly it gets merged. Wanting to improve on this process, I re-evaluated some of my soft skills such as how I write pull requests. Instead of focusing on how fast I could write, I worked towards making the review process easier. The goal of a PR is to introduce a change and this is my guide to making a good first impression.

Filed Under: Software Engineering  

 
 Ray in WordPress Development: Debugging | Tom McFarlin

TL;DR: Though knowing how to use a debugger is useful, it can be overkill for some of the work that we’re doing. In this article, we’ll look and see what debugging functionality Ray provides and how we can use it when traditional debugging may be overkill.

Filed Under: Backend   WordPress  

 
 git alias tab completion for functions – Sal Ferrarello

When creating a Git alias that points to a function, sometimes Git provides the wrong tab completion by default (e.g. filename completion instead of branch name completion). This is how we can tell Git, which type of completion to use.

Filed Under: CLI   Git  

 Setting Up PHP CodeSniffer Per Project

Anyway, the basic points of that article still stand, but if you’re working on a variety of projects and some of them require different configurations, settings, and standards, then the way you go about installing and configuring PHP CodeSniffer may be different than how you configure it on a system-level.

Filed Under: CLI   Dev   Local   Software Engineering  

 Programming Sucks

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro,1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.

[ via: @tomhermans ]

This hit home. Programming can be a grueling task on it's own and if you are doing it on the support or agency side of things the pace can be break neck more often than not. Burn out is real and the amount of things we are required to "think" our way through can be so taxing, mentally. Some days I just have nothing left after work. There's more I want to do but I'm just spent. This weekend I took naps, went to be early and slept in all weekend! If you know me that's highly unusual. But the last few weeks have been tough on a personal level and super busy on the coding / job level. So I've needed a break and got some rest. It's ok to slow down and take time for yourself. I'm just saying that out loud to remind me to it more often.

Filed Under: Burn Out   Mental Health   Software Engineering  

 Curated WP CLI Addons

WP CLI is pretty slick as is but Alain Schlesser has this curated list of excellent addons/plugins for WP CLI. I had to write my own version of a WP CLI years ago when I ran nearly 400 WordPress sites for 451 Press. I'm glad that this is now part of WP Core there's some really cool extras in this collection.

Filed Under: CLI   WordPress   WP CLI  

 Shape Divider

Our head of Engineering at WebDevStudios posted this slick tool for creating shape dividers for your design. This is pretty damn cool!

Filed Under: CSS   Design  

 Building Assets, Merging Git Branches, and Creating Releases

Tom McFarlin writes about setting up a git workflow for creating a built release. Good strategy for creating a distro that has your required components and assets so that it's ready for install.

Filed Under: CLI   Dev   Git  

 PHP RFC: Named Arguments

Named arguments allow passing arguments to a function based on the parameter name, rather than the parameter position. This makes the meaning of the argument self-documenting, makes the arguments order-independent, and allows skipping default values arbitrarily.

[ via: @justCarakas ]

Another RFC proposed for PHP 8. Not sure exactly how I feel about this one yet. I like the idea but Jeremy also pointed out that then params become part of the public API. Need to think about this one some more. -Chrispian

Filed Under: Dev   PHP   PHP8   Software Engineering  

 Dracula Pro For Optimizing Optimizing Dark Mode

A few months ago, I reluctantly started to try out using the dark theme that comes with macOS and iOS. I’d already been using a similar theme in my IDE and my terminal, so why not take the plunge for the whole experience across the OS?

[ via: @tommcfarlin ]

I've got pretty strong preferences on my IDE / UI stuff but I might have to check this one out. Looks pretty slick and I do like the idea of a more unified look and feel for everything. -Chrispian

Filed Under: Dev  

 PHP RFC: Nullsafe operator

Short circuiting refers to skipping the evaluation of an expression based on some given condition. Two common examples are the operators && and ||. There are three ways the nullsafe operator ?-> could implement short circuiting. We’ll look at the same code snippet for every option.

[ via: @markjaquith ]

I like this idea. I usually don't like things that makes code less easy to understand and favor being more verbose. In this case I think this one actually makes it easier to read and might make it a little easier to avoid making silly mistakes. -Chrispian

Filed Under: Dev   PHP   PHP8   Software Engineering  

 Practicing Recursion with 7 Algorithm Challenges

Remember the first time you solved an algorithmic challenge by yourself without looking up the solution, only to be told to solve it again using a recursive function?

As this appears to be a common scenario, especially in a tech interview setting, I am putting together a list of classic algorithm challenges to help flex our recursive brain muscles, as this appears to be a common scenario, especially in a tech interview setting.....

[ via: chrispian ]

Filed Under: Code Kata   Dev   Interviewing   Software Engineering   Testing  

 How to remove core WordPress blocks

While I try to support all the core blocks in the themes I build, sometimes it makes sense to remove a few.

Typically it’s because I built a custom block that’s similar to a core block while addressing the design and functional requirements of the theme. Most of my themes include a “Content and Image” block that’s similar to the “Media & Text” block but it uses the theme’s grid layout

Filed Under: Blocks   Gutenberg   WordPress  

 Array destructuring in PHP

In PHP, list or [] is a so called "language construct", just like array(). This language construct is used to "pull" variables out of an array. In other words: it will "destructure" the array into separate variables.

Filed Under: Arrays   PHP  

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My name is Chrispian and I like to make things. I'm a web developer and have been working in the computer / internet field for almost 26 years now. I also draw, write, make things, take pictures and love figuring stuff out. Read More

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