Thoughts, explanations, and musings, usually on web development.
I’ve been working on a project involving long-running, resource-intensive batch jobs in Node. At first, when my needs were simpler, I used Heroku to run these jobs. It was great, but eventually, the price:performance ratio offered became a little too…
When I was getting started in web development, I remember how conceptually overwhelming it was to understand the whys, whats, and hows around things like unit testing. And to make it even more difficult, WordPress was the environment in which I spent…
It’s a well-established truth of the universe that JavaScript’s is one of the best parts of the language, allowing us to write cleaner, simpler code to manipulate array values, instead of using something like . For example, let’s say we want to…
Hearken back, for a moment, to what it was like merging objects in 2014. There was no support for the feature in JavaScript runtimes themselves, and it was quite common to find a solution to the problem by wading through StackOverflow to find…
For quite some time now, I’ve been working with a PHP application that, up until recently, had no clearly-defined coding standards in place. At some point, the decision was made to enforce PSR-2, and to do so at an incremental level. When a file is…
I’ve often needed to quickly spin up a local instance of MySQL. Docker Compose this makes it stupid easy. Rather than running a long, convoluted command, I can configure an image just the way I want it while maintaining the ability to turn it easily…
A while back, I wrote about building your own lazy loading functionality into WordPress. In that post, I use a regular expression to add a class to image tags that don’t already have any class. It failed. Rather than adding it to images with no…
Resource hints (preload, prefetch, prerender, etc.) have breathed some fresh life into the front-end performance game, especially as browsers are coming to support them more & more. For a traditional server-rendered application, a lot of these hints…
A guest post in which I explore why JavaScript’s reduce() method is able to help sequentually resolve a collection of Promise objects.
It’s easy to rattle off a bunch of ways you can improve the performance of your website: minify your CSS & JS optimize your images cache the crap out of it use a CDN etc. Those are all important, but there’s also a more modern, less-discussed…
If you’ve spent 20 seconds in WordPress development, you’ve likely worked with, cursed, and fallen in love with the WP_Query class — one of the most useful, commonly used tools in any given WordPress website or application. Aside from being…
Squeezing every last drop of performance out of your website on any platform is an always-changing, never-ending, often addictive battle. Among the several tactics you can employ in this fight, optimizing your site’s resource hints is a modern…
If you’re making modifications to the functionality of your WordPress site or application, there are generally two places where people put the code to do it. A theme’s functions.php file. A plugin. Given the choice, which option should you almost…
When I started web development, beginning a new project often felt like drowning and then being asked to write JavaScript that worked. At the time, all I needed to do was perform some DOM stuff: make an element disappear on a click, add some classes…
When you’re looking to incorporate any given feature into your WordPress application, there’s rarely a shortage of third-party plugins out there to make it happen. But sometimes, whether you’re trying to avoid the inevitable complexity an unfamiliar…
A while back, I wrote my first Lambda function with Firebase. Like every Lambda function tutorial on the web shows you how to do, mine processes a payment via Stripe when someone purchases a license for TypeIt, the most versatile JavaScript animated…
Securely handling personal information on the web is a pretty big deal, and one of the ways you do that is making sure none of it’s sent via query string in a URL. Things like this are bad: In fact, Google has some clear policies explicitly…
If you’ve been a developer for more than 7 minutes, you’ve probably felt uncomfortably pressured into doing something weird with your code, like specifically styling plain, classless, attribute-less elements. Don’t ask for the details, just accept…