What Roger Wilco Taught Me About Problem Solving
Roger Wilco – space janitor extraordinaire and the everyman hero of the Space Quest adventure game series – has a lot to teach us about problem solving.
Category: Opinion
Building Community in a Post-COVID World
Communities have evolved a whole lot in 2020. The global COVID pandemic has changed the face of the world and the community industry has become more relevant than ever. But what’s going to happen once the pandemic subsides? What will communities look like & how will groups come together?
A Membership Identity for the WordPress Community
I recently presented a workshop on defining a membership identity for your community. I found this to be a valuable exercise and thought I would apply the same principles to the WordPress community since that is the community with which I am most familiar.
Some Thoughts on Local WordCamps
WordCamps are, by definition, local events. There are many opinions about this within the community, some of which conflict with the guidelines set down for WordCamps. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on it all from the perspective of a long-time WordCamp organiser who used to be critical of many of those guidelines but now works on the WordCamp Central team.
My Experience with a Pixelbook
About 2 months ago I switched from using Kubuntu on a Dell XPS 15 to working full time on a Pixelbook running Chrome OS. Here are my thoughts about using this as my full time work machine.
Embracing a Change in Career
There’s a strange, often subconscious, view held by most developers – whether they will admit it or not, they tend to see other career paths as less important than what…
Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires
My fellow South Africans will be familiar with Bokkie making sure we know that only WE have the power to prevent bush and veld fires. The emotive tear and the damning words…
Software development never changes
In the early ’80s, my father trained countless Cobol programmers. Today I write WordPress plugins, but there’s one thing that our work has in common.
What WordPress means to me
“WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.” That’s how WordPress is introduced on WordPress.org – a humble introduction for software that powers a huge chunk of the internet. Not only that, but to many people (myself included) WordPress is more than just ‘web software’ – it enables and signifies something far greater than that. This is what WordPress mean to me.
Setting up my WordPress development environment
Plenty of posts have been written about setting up a local development environment for WordPress, but when I moved to a new Macbook (running OS X Yosemite) I couldn’t find a post that contained all the instructions I needed. After some searching I got everything up and running and thought it would be worthwhile to share my process and tools here for posterity.
Better bbPress admin icons
After recently training a client on how to use their new bbPress-powered site, I discovered that the default admin menu icons for bbPress are not very intuitive and the client found them slightly confusing, so I improved them.
Storing snippets in Gist
I’ve been using Gist for a while, but only as a way to quickly share snippets of code with people. I’ve now decided to change that a bit and make better use of the service – as a result I have added all my snippets from this blog to my Gists and I will continue to add even the smallest snippets as I develop them.