Resources

Music to get in the coding zone

Published by on March 19, 2016

Inspired by this post, I wanted to share with you a list of albums that get me into the mood for some serious, distraction free, productive coding. Most of these are “ambient” from the nineties. They were designed to be listened in their entirety, so you can just switch on and tune in.

The Irresistible Force – Flying High

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The Future Sound of London – LifeForms

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The Orb – Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld

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Miles Davis – Kind of Blue

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John Coltrane – Giant Steps

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Happy coding!

Let me know what your favorite music to code to is in the comments.

book review: Mastering Object Oriented PHP

Published by on March 19, 2016

cover-227x300I bought this eBook after seeing it mentioned in a tweet along with an online course.

First of all, I wasn’t familiar with the author Brandon Savage at all, and it’s self published, so there was no real guarantee of quality. But I just went ahead and bought it anyway.

With such a title, I was expecting something a little meatier, and I certainly don’t feel like I master PHP OOP after reading this book. I count 80 pages in my PDF reader. For the price tag of $39, it is quite expensive if you compare it to other programming eBooks out there. I did get a 10% discount though.

Brandon is an experienced developer, and that transpires throughout the book. And for me the real value in reading this book is to get an overview of the different current best practices in OOP PHP, and pitfalls to avoid.

I enjoyed the explanation of the interface pattern most and it’s something I hope I can apply in my future projects.

It would have been nice to have some extra material to accompany the book such as a fully functional sample program, or some video screencasts. Just a suggestion to make the offer more attractive.

If you do purchase the book, it will give you a discount on the upcoming online course that Brandon will be giving. Enrollment opens on March 5th.
 
Enroll in online class

Welcome to Github, what’s next?

Published by on March 19, 2016

So you’ve just registered on Github because a friend or colleague told you it’s a great place to learn from other people’s code and play farmville? Good for you! Now go and follow these awesome developers! You’ll learn tons by looking at their theme and plugin code.

Joe Hoyle from HumanMade

Justin Tadlock, maker of Hybrid Core

Tom McFarlin, WP Tuts author and Hello Dolly Podcast

Gary Jones Genesis contributor

Bill Erickson Genesis contributor

Jared Atchinson Genesis contributor

Andrew Norcross author of the popular metaboxes class

Frank Bültge author of popular plugins like Adminimize

Deckerweb author of many Genesis plugins

Jeffrey Way Nettuts author

Chris Coyier CSS tricks

Pippin Williamson  author of Easy Digital Downloads

Andrew Nacin WordPress core developer

Mark Jaquith WordPress core developer

Alex King Crowd Favorite

Thomas Griffin Expert Genesis developer

Konstantin Kovshenin Automattic

Michael Fields theme wrangler at Automattic

Brian Gardner author of the Genesis theme

Brian Richards author the Startbox theme (suggested by Brad Thomas)

WebDevStudios great team of WordPress developers, thanks Ozh

and feel free to follow me : Paul de Wouters

I’ll expand the list based on your suggestion, so if you’re following some great WordPress developers on Github let me know in the comments!