THE PENDING DRAFT

Pippin Williamson on Backwards Compatibility

May 8, 2015

Pippin Williamson with a great presentation at LoopConf about Backwards Compatibility and why it’s such an important thing to think about when you develop plugins. He covers many examples of what could happen if you break things and how to avoid those issues.

Backwards compatibility is a cornerstone of WordPress core development philosophy. It is, unfortunately, not something nearly enough plugin or theme developers take seriously. When a plugin or theme project gains 10s or 100s of thousands of users, backwards compatibility can be crucial to the overall health of the project.

Ensuring backwards compatibility is more of a mental mindset than anything. Developers have to mentally make the commitment and say to themselves “I will NOT break installs during upgrades”.

As we are building our own plugin at the moment, Backwards Compatibility is something i think about a lot lately, because as soon as we have it released, some things will be impossible or much harder to change so we better try to get it right the first time.

A Commitment to Backwards Compatibility

The Knife Maker

April 23, 2015

A shortfilm about a writer from Brooklyn who found his thing in handcrafted knife making. A very inspiring story!

In our second film, we meet writer turned knife maker Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn. He talks about the human element of craft, and the potential for a skill to mature into an art. And in sharing his story, he alights on the real meaning of handmade—a movement whose riches are measured in people, not cash.

Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker

Do not Track

April 19, 2015

Do Not Track is a personalized documentary series about privacy and the web economy. If you share data with the site, it’ll show you what the web knows about you.

Do Not Track

Birdly

March 28, 2015

Birdly is a pretty cool project which intends to simulate flying like a bird in a full body simulator. It uses an Oculus Rift, a moving platform, wind, tactile feedback and even different smells to create a truly virtual reality experience.

I would love to try this thing out for a fly once and there could even be a chance given that it’s developed here in Zurich at the University of the Arts.

Birdly Website