This past weekend, my Father-in-Law, Dave, and I set out on a journey: walk up High Street from where it intersects I-270 on the south side of Columbus (near Obetz) and finish in my hometown of Worthington, where 23 crosses 270 again on the north side. Grand total: 16.7 miles of conversation, good beer, and exploring the city I love.
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Anyone who’s had to do code reviews on a team before can tell you that inconsistent coding standards add a lot of unnecessary noise to the review process. Even minor things like trailing whitespace, spaces v. tabs, code indentation, and whitespace (or lack thereof) around function declarations can cause merge conflicts and increase the time it takes to do a good code review.
Fortunately, coding standards are pretty easy to check, and there are great tools like PHP_CodeSniffer that can scan your codebase for issues with coding standards. WordPress has a well-defined set of coding standards, and there’s even a collection of PHP_CodeSniffer standards for WordPress. With Composer and a little bit of configuration we can check our coding standards, catch common security issues (missing input sanitization, output escaping, etc.), and even validate that everything’s well-documented.
We have the tools to write standards-compliant code, so now we just have to configure them and make them run automatically. That’s where my latest project comes in: I’m happy to announce WP Enforcer is available for your projects!
This year I’ll be participating in my second-ever Movember to raise funds and awareness for men’s health issues. You may recall I was the Captain of Buckeye Interactive’s grow team in 2013, and this year I’m helping lead the charge for 10up’s MoTeam!
For the uninitiated, Movember is an annual fundraiser wherein men – starting clean-shaven – grow mustaches over the month of November to raise awareness for men’s health issues. Along the way, we raise money to help fund research for prostate and testicular cancers and support programs promoting strong mental health and physical fitness.
As you may have heard, my wife and I had our first child, Emily, one month ago today. The last month has been full of ups and downs, sleepless nights and unthinkable joy. The diapers and spit up are manageable, but the sleep has been the hardest.
Imagine this: you’re holding your newborn in your arms, gently patting her back until she drifts off to sleep. After ten or twenty minutes, she finally dozes off, and you slowly creep over to her crib to put her down. As soon as her head touches the mattress, she stirs, letting out a howl. Quickly, you reach for the pacifier to try to soothe this beast whom with cannot be reasoned, and the peaceful bliss of infant slumber resumes. You stumble back to the plush nursery armchair, hopeful to get at least a few minutes of peace before you head off to bed, when the gentle suckling of the pacifier stops; you brace yourself for what comes next: the blood-curdling scream of the child when she realizes the pacifier has fallen out of her mouth.
Last evening, my wife gave birth to our beautiful, healthy baby girl, Emily.
I want to thank our friends and family for all the support we’ve received and my wife Kim for giving me this opportunity to embark on this adventure.
About a month ago I wrote a very personal post on my attempts at weight loss, focusing on what was working for me and what kept me motivated. Sadly, shortly after publishing that post the pounds stopped slipping off so easily; in fact, I’m only down a few pounds from where I was a month ago (I’m not a superstitious person, but the proximity to me writing about how I haven’t plateaued and hitting a plateau is suspect).
I received an email from a technical recruiter a few weeks ago asking not if I was interested in a position, but how she could better communicate with senior-level talent. The email spoke to me, so in the interest of helping good, well-meaning recruiters, I’ve decided to answer the email by way of a public blog post, in the hopes that my answers to this particular recruiter will help others (both on the talent management and development sides) build stronger relationships and find better placements.
With our daughter due in less than a month, there’s a whole list of things we’ve been doing around the house to get ready for her arrival. I’ve had and idea kicking around in my head for the last few months, and this morning I finally implemented it: installing an on/off switch on our doorbell.
As of today I’ve removed my portfolio from this site. The portfolio has always been the section most lacking in substance, and I feel I’ve reached a point in my career where my accomplishments are publicized well enough through my Twitter account, my GitHub profile, and through the efforts of my teammates at 10up that a dedicated “Portfolio” section on my site feels out of place.
I’m proud to announce my latest WordPress plugin: Revision Strike.
Unless post revisions are explicitly limited, WordPress will build up a hefty sum of revisions over time. While it’s great to have revision history for some recent content, the chances that old revisions will be necessary diminish the longer a post has been published. Revision Strike is designed to automatically remove these unneeded revisions on older, published posts.
