THE PENDING DRAFT

If you use code on a daily basis, i’m pretty sure you also have a big pile of functions, classes and snippets that you used over and over again but never fully grasped how exactly they work in detail. That little snippet you found in a tutorial some years ago or that small bit of code you borrowed from a plugin and included in your themes ever since. Because they just worked, without the need to understand every single line of every bit of code you use.

Take it apart

The last weeks i started to make it a regular habit to take one piece of code and take it apart until i fully understand it. Whether that is a function in WP Core (or any other software you’re using) or just a small code-snippet i used over and over again. I take that code, read through it line by line, and if there is just one single comma i don’t understand i stop and google it, look it up on stackoverflow etc. until i find out exactly why it is there and what it does.

The trick here is to only take small regular steps, one at a time. You would be a fool to think you could master Regular Expressions in just some minutes, but taking apart that one function that uses some Regular Expressions isn’t that hard, gets you started and gets you the satisfaction of having learned something new.

You’ll be amazed how much you will learn without really investing a lot of time.