Cabel Sasser gave an honest and personal talk at XOXO 2013 about how they started Panic and became what they are today. It’s always easy to look up to people who “made it” and to think everything was easy and just fell in place for them. From the outside everything looks easy. But there’s always a great amount of work and struggle behind every success, that you don’t see. Nice to get that “behind the scenes” perspective.
Found via Manical Rage.
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.
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.
I like TED Talks. And i liked this one in particular. You should watch it, too.
Creative exhaust, the power of being open by default: Brad Frost at TEDxGrandviewAve
Chris Lema with some practical tips and his personal way of giving project estimates. Best article i read on the subject in a long time.
“I know you may think that if you give me a budget I’m going to make the project use up all that budget, even if it’s smaller. Let me assure you of one thing – and this isn’t personal and it’s not you. Most people’s budget is 2-3 times smaller than their desires or expectations.”
Watch real-time traffic in your city, beautifully visualized. It’s just amazing to see what’s possible with a bunch of open data feeds.
webdesignrepo is a curated collection of helpful links from around the web. Primarily the repo is for webdesign links, but there is a large overlap with web development and graphic design.
Huge collection of all kinds of links related to webdesign, sorted in “Daily Visits, Blogs/News, Inspiration, Learning, Tutorials, Snippets, Plugins, Architecture, Tools, Resources and Community”. Definitely something to bookmark!
As you may know, MP6 – the new admin interface – has finally found it’s way into core and will be part of WordPress 3.8 by default. I personally love the new design and couldn’t imagine going back, but there’s always room for improvement. George Kordas has made quite a comprehensive concept of what the admin screen could look like in the future. It is modern and brings the look and feel of iOS7 to the screen with it’s blurred backgrounds and light fonts. I especially like the media uploader screen.
As he writes on the site, he’s developing this whole thing and will be releasing it as a free plugin. Looking forward to it!
This will also be a free plugin which is currently in production.
Follow me @ twitter.com/gkordas for release date.
Great presentation from Yuri Victor at WordCamp San Francisco about how and why they use (and love) WordPress at the Washington Post.
Great Presentation by Brad Frost talking about bullshit in our information overflowed world today.
Some good advice in this talk from Jason Fried about why offices, meetings and managers often fail to provide a productive environment. Go watch it, and if you didn’t already read his book Rework you should go read that, too.