A Collection of My Talks

Last updated February 2019.

Here’s a list of the various talks (mostly WordPress) that I’ve given in the past, along with the video recordings and slides when they’re available.

Zen Mode: Developing While You’re Offline

Those of us who work in the web industry find that we’re online a huge amount of the time. Going offline can make us feel disconnected. But what about going offline while we’re working? Right at the time when we think we’re most likely to need an internet connection: to get our job done.

Working offline can be highly productive, and is often calming and focused. Whether we choose to go offline, or whether our surroundings make it necessary — such as while we’re traveling — having the right tools, environment, and frame of mind allows you to make working offline a joy.

In this talk, I cover the tools and approaches that I use to develop while I’m in zen mode and not connected to the internet.

Continue reading “A Collection of My Talks”

Misleading Code Coverage Reports for Switch Statements

I was recently investigating the code coverage of the map_meta_cap() function in WordPress’ core unit test suite — particularly the large switch statement contained within the function. I was surprised to see that the coverage was higher than I was expecting, because I know for a fact that several meta capabilities aren’t tested.

It turns out there is a subtle code coverage reporting issue for switch statements that allow multiple conditions to trigger one action.

Continue reading “Misleading Code Coverage Reports for Switch Statements”

Git changelog generator

When I’m preparing a new release of one of my plugins, its Git commit history is a great starting point to use when writing the changelog.

Rather than dealing with a bunch of parameters in git log, I use a simple Git alias which generates a plain list of the commit messages between the previous tag and the current HEAD. I can then copy and paste this into my changelog, and go from there.

Continue reading “Git changelog generator”

My Sublime Text 3 Packages

Update August 2018: I use Code now.

Blog posts like these (the latest of which is Dominik Schilling’s) have helped me find packages in the past, so I thought it was time I published my own.

I use Sublime Text 3 for the same reason as Dominik. It’s exceptionally fast. One day I will inevitably switch to the free and open source Atom editor, but it’s got a long way to go until it can match ST3’s performance.

Here are the packages I use:

Continue reading “My Sublime Text 3 Packages”

SublimeCodeIntel in Sublime Text 3

Update: Forget about SublimeCodeIntel and use the new CodeComplice package instead.

There is now a Sublime Text 3 compatible version of SublimeCodeIntel, thanks to the hard work of Germán M. Bravo (aka Kronuz). I had a job getting it to correctly index my project files though. I’m posting here what I did, in the hopes it’ll help someone else out.

Continue reading “SublimeCodeIntel in Sublime Text 3”

WordPress Contributors on a World Map

As a fun data visualisation experiment – and as a way to practice my new found interest in Node.js – I decided to plot on a map of the world all the people who contributed to the recent release of WordPress 3.6. The map can be seen further down, but first a brief description of how I went about it.

I decided to generate a GeoJSON file of the contributor’s locations so it can be displayed wherever and however the open GeoJSON format is supported, not least on GitHub which recently added support for automatic rendering of GeoJSON files.

Continue reading “WordPress Contributors on a World Map”

A History of WordPress Contributors

I thought I’d run some stats on WordPress contributors over the years. The only contributor stats I have are the ones published in each release announcement on wordpress.org, so I’ve put these stats together myself from those lists.

Unfortunately the release announcements have only listed the contributors since version 2.9 (June 2009). If anyone wants to get me the list of contributors for earlier versions I’ll happily update this post. It’d be interesting to see the numbers over the years.

Continue reading “A History of WordPress Contributors”