Author: philipjohn

  • 8 WordCamps and counting…

    8 WordCamps and counting…

    I accidentally lied to a lot of people last week. While at WordCamp Europe in Athens I was telling people that it was only my second WordCamp Europe. Turns out I’d completely forgotten about 2019! (Sorry John.) So to help myself tell the truth I thought I’d list out my WordCamp history and why not…

  • Realising I had ADHD changed my life

    Realising I had ADHD changed my life

    Even in the middle of my assessment I still didn’t quite believe I had ADHD. I still felt like an imposter. Then Edward, my psychologist, told me I’d scored eight out of nine on the inattentive measures. I finally started to believe it. By the end I was choking up, struggling to put anything into…

  • WordPress at 20: (Nearly) half my life…

    WordPress at 20: (Nearly) half my life…

    18 years, 7 months and 20 days ago I published my first blog post on my first (public, at least) WordPress site. WordPress was not even 18 months old. Today WordPress turns 20 and for very nearly half of my life now I’ve been blogging with, building with and developing on WordPress. It’s been my…

  • Archiving a large WordPress uploads folder

    Archiving a large WordPress uploads folder

    Whilst trying to create an archive (.tar.gz) of a WordPress site uploads folder I was hitting issues with the command getting cut off for various reasons (poor connection, SSH host disconnecting etc). I also found that as the archive grew larger it took longer and longer to add files to it, making it more likely…

  • How I use AI to become a better developer

    How I use AI to become a better developer

    Over the many years I’ve been a WordPress engineer I’ve performed countless launches and migrations. It’s actually one of my favourite things to do. Often times that involves manipulating large amounts of data and as such I’ve learnt about a bunch of command line tools to help me process and manipulate data and assets. My…

  • Convert PHP arrays to short array syntax in seconds

    Convert PHP arrays to short array syntax in seconds

    Having just had to look this up, I thought I’d share how I did it. It’s really really easy. 1. Require code sniffer in your project (you are using composer, right?) 2. Run CBF using the DisallowLongArraySyntax sniff That will apply to everything in the current directory, so simply change the . to whichever specific…

  • Copying theme options between Pantheon environments using WP CLI

    Copying theme options between Pantheon environments using WP CLI

    One of my tasks today was to activate a new child theme on a project. We’d already migrated the site to Pantheon (using their very straightforward migration plugin) and had activated the parent theme – in this case Newspack – to start playing around. The Problem My colleague Bart had completed initial work on the…

  • Remembering things is hard. Or is it?

    Remembering things is hard. Or is it?

    As someone who has a terrible memory I was fascinated to learn about a method of Spaced Repetition via this amazing web comic-style thing. If you struggle to remember information, or just want a better memory, give it a go. Image credit: Image credit: Marco Verch

  • Learning by doing, and more…

    Learning by doing, and more…

    Last night my brain interrupted my enjoyment of Time Trap to make me ponder why I’m not particular motivated to learn new things. When there’s so much New to learn in web development all the time, it’s pretty important to keep up, but I haven’t been feeling up to it. Thankfully I remembered that I…