Steve Grunwell

Someone writing a to-do list in a notebook

Steal This Idea: Extract TODOs from a Codebase

December 13, 2019

As a software developer, it’s incredibly common to browse a codebase and find that the functionality that was advertised doesn’t really exist.

Maybe the function or class method is there, but where there should be some brilliant logic, instead there’s a comment to the effect of “TODO: actually implement this.”

It’s frustrating, especially if you know that the developer who wrote that comment is long-gone, but what can you do? The nature of the industry is that we’re hopping between projects (or jobs) almost constantly; how can anyone remember all of the “when I get time, I need to get back to that” demands on them?

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Steal This Idea: Campaign Contribution Visualizer

December 12, 2019

In Ideas

In the same vein as my idea for a Social Media Analyzer tool, my interest in politics also brought up another question: why isn’t there an easy way to see who — at a local level — is supporting different candidates?

Legally, political campaigns have to disclose who their donors are. After all, money often buys influence, and an elected officials’ constituents have the right to know for whom their representative might be working.

Naturally, there are all kinds of sneaky ways to get around these rules (search “dark money” for more on that topic), but at the local-level it’s good to know who has the ear of your local representative.

In the state of Ohio, we have a rather simple system where raw campaign contribution data is available for downloading and searching, but there isn’t an easy way to see (for instance) what counties are supporting which candidates.

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Steal This Idea: Social Media Analyzer

December 11, 2019

In Ideas

After the 2018 mid-term elections proved to be rather disappointing for the state of Ohio, I toyed with the idea of running for public office. It’s still not something I’ve ruled out, but the emotions it all stirred up got me thinking about campaign-oriented technology.

I started thinking about what tools might benefit a younger, progressive candidate and I realized that social media can be a tremendous asset or a tremendous liability.

People my age (early 30s) are the first ones to really enter adulthood in the age of social media; I joined Facebook when it was first rolling out to select Universities, and had been blogging and on MySpace throughout high school.

Unfortunately, when you put yourself into the public eye, you must expect some level of scrutiny. Old Tweets posts will be dug up, tagged photos will be scrutinized, and Facebook posts from your 21st birthday will be surfaced. If you’re not doing this research ahead of time, you can be damn sure your opposition will.

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Steal This Idea: WordPress Image Copyright Plugin

December 10, 2019

In Ideas

There’s a whole side to digital media that most people don’t see: metadata. Every picture taken with a digital camera has all sorts of details embedded in it, in the form of EXIF, IPTC and/or XMP data. This can include everything from the color profile of the image and when it was created down to whether or not the flash fired, the ISO settings, and — if a GPS was available — where the photo was taken.

What if WordPress could automatically apply copyright details to each and every image uploaded to a site?

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A drawing of a lightbulb pinned to a corkboard

Please Steal These Ideas

December 9, 2019

In Ideas

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post with an idea for a “Be Your Own Barista” bar at coffee shops and hotels. I don’t know whether or not anyone picked it up and ran with it or not (if so, please let me know!), but thought process behind that post was essentially “hey, I have an idea but no means/interest in taking it to fruition.”

Today, I have a personal Trello board filled with ideas. A lot of them are potential software libraries or products, but I occasionally dip outside of the realm of programming.

The problem is that I don’t have time to do them all.

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Quick Tip: Monitor Multiple Twitter Hashtags at Once

October 30, 2019

In Conferences

Of the major social networks, Twitter is about the only place I regularly participate. It’s far from perfect (and I’ve become quite skilled at the ol’ report-and-block maneuver), but for me, Twitter is that right combination of breaking news, tech discussions, and comedy (safe to say we could all do without the white supremacists and bots on the service, of course).

My employer, Liquid Web, is a Platinum Sponsor of WordCamp US this weekend, and we’ll have a few different hashtags we’ll be promoting. While I’m not directly in sales/marketing, I still wanted to find a way to stay on top of both WordCamp US and Liquid Web-related posts.

There are certainly tools out there for monitoring multiple hashtags, but I was hoping to find a native way within either Tweetbot or (shudder) the official Twitter app. Unfortunately, neither seem to [directly] offer this feature natively.

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Demystifying Regular Expressions

June 21, 2019

In Code

Early in my career, I stumbled upon this regular expressions cheat sheet by Dave Child in one of those “10 cheat sheets every developer should have”-type round-up articles.

I had been using regular expressions for several years before I first noticed that other developers were struggling. Patterns that seemed natural to me were complex ciphers to my peers, and an audible groan would echo through the office whenever a solution that leveraged regular expressions was proposed.

Here’s the rub: regular expressions don’t have to be that hard. They certainly require a bit of getting used to and some practice, but regex patterns are tremendously useful when validating data, searching files, or even filtering tweets.

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A close up of a pair of stainless steel knife blades

Writing Custom Laravel Blade Directives

March 18, 2019

In Laravel

Though it’s far from the top of the list of most celebrated features, Laravel’s Blade templating engine makes it really nice to work with data on the front-end of our applications. With built-in helpers for handling loops, conditionals, and sub-views, Blade gives us a nice way to write dynamic templates that don’t feel like a bunch of PHP mixed in with HTML.

Were you aware you can author your own Laravel Blade directives? The syntax is probably a little under-documented, but it can be an incredibly useful tool if you find yourself applying the same patterns over and over. In this post, I want to show you a Blade directive I find myself using in pretty much every application I build: @activeIfInRouteGroup.

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Stacks of vintage, sepia-toned photographs

Paid Support for Legacy Libraries

March 14, 2019

In Thoughts

A few weeks ago, I was talking to my good friend Eric Mann about an open-source package he maintains. This particular package has quite a number of downloads and active users, despite Eric trying to abandon it a few years ago. He’s since restarted development on it, but now he faces a problem: people are upset that he’s dropped legacy PHP version support.

This particular package is popular within the WordPress ecosystem, which is big on backwards compatibility. Despite the fact that both PHP 5.6 and 7.0 stopped receiving even security updates at the end of 2018, there are still plenty of users out there running their applications in old, insecure versions of PHP. As a result, some people were rather upset when Eric stated “I’m not going to spend my [limited] time supporting EOL’d versions of PHP.”

Some commenters were quick to jump in with remarks ranging from “well, it doesn’t take that much time to support older versions of PHP…” to “WordPress supports older versions of PHP, so should you!”, but Eric remained firm: if you want support for older versions of PHP, you can either pay me for my time or contribute the code yourself.

It may sound a little harsh, but I’m 100% with Eric on this one: he doesn’t owe anybody his time and effort. That’s time he could be spending with his family, out hiking, or working on projects that he enjoys. Heck, knowing what Eric can do, back-porting support for old versions of PHP should be way down on his list of priorities.

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A home sitting on a midwestern, prairie homestead.

Simplify Project On-boarding with Laravel Homestead

January 21, 2019

In Laravel

Despite working on Liquid Web’s Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce hosting products, a fair amount of the development work I do these days has very little to do with WordPress. In fact, my main project right now is using Laravel, and it’s the sixth Laravel application (depending on how you count projects) I’ve worked on in just under two years at the company.

Laravel’s an incredibly powerful application framework with a thriving ecosystem. Thanks to tools like Composer and Packagist, I have access to thousands of libraries, extensions, and utilities to help me build the best applications possible. Even out of the box, the framework has support for (among many other things) multiple database and caching engines, event-driven architecture, and websockets, giving me a strong foundation for building modern web applications.

Of course, incorporating multiple platforms and tools into a single application can make on-boarding new team members more difficult. How do you make sure they’re running the right versions of PHP, your RDBMS of choice, Redis, and more?

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Steve Grunwell

Open-source contributor, speaker, and electronics tinkerer

Page 2 of 14

Steal This Idea: Extract TODOs from a Codebase

Steal This Idea: Campaign Contribution Visualizer

Steal This Idea: WordPress Image Copyright Plugin

Please Steal These Ideas

Quick Tip: Monitor Multiple Twitter Hashtags at Once

Demystifying Regular Expressions

Writing Custom Laravel Blade Directives

Paid Support for Legacy Libraries

Simplify Project On-boarding with Laravel Homestead

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