Today I gave a talk about using WP CLI in the March 2020 edition of Chennai WordPress Meetup.
The talk was more of a hand-on session where I gave demo and explained the different features that are available in WP CLI.
You can download the slides from my slideshare account or view them below. While you are at it, you can also checkout some of my other talks.
I am in Mumbai this weekend to attend WordCamp Mumbai 2017. Unlike other WordCamps this one is spread across two days.
In this WordCamp I gave a talk about WordPress developer tools and moderated a group discussion about testing.
This time in addition to regular talks, the organizers also added a group discussion about testing. I moderated this discussion among a panel of 4 people who are heavily involved in testing.
The discussion revolved around the various testing tools and processes that people use for testing especially in the WordPress context and how they account for compatibility issues with different PHP versions, WordPress versions and other plugins.
I found this discussion very useful as a developer and learned about a couple of things that I can do to make testing easier.
There were also lot of good suggestions from the audience and one of them mentioned that you should try to do pair programming involving a developer and tester together. This is the first time I heard of such a practice and I am very interested to know whether this works. I might give it a try sometime soon.
I gave a talk about the different developer tools that I use to increase my productivity as a WordPress developer. This talk is very similar to the one that I gave in WordCamp Kochi last month, but I tweaked a couple of things especially around wp-cli and phpcs since there were other talks that went in detail in those topics.
I covered the following tools.
You can download the slides from my slideshare account or view them below. While you are at it, you can also checkout some of my other talks.
The talk was recorded, so I am sure the organizers will upload them to WordPress TV soon. Once it is uploaded I will link it up here.
Posted in Events/Conferences, WordPress Tagged Mumbai, WordCamp, WordPress 14 Comments
I traveled to Kochi today to attend WordCamp Kochi 2017, the first ever WordCamp to happen in South India. I am waiting in the airport to return home as I write this.
Even though this was the first WordCamp in Kochi, the organizer did a wonderful job and it was planned and executed perfectly. Kudos to the organizers and volunteers.
I was very surprised and happy to note that remote working culture has really taken off in India.
When I attended WordCamp Pune in 2015, apart from my colleges who worked at 10up, there were only one or two other people who worked remotely. But this time I found more than 10 people who are working remotely.
There were lot of foreign companies and even some local Indian companies that have adopted remote working.
I don’t get the eyeballs that I used to get earlier anymore when ever I mention that work 100% remotely 😉
I gave a talk about the different developer tools that I use to increase my productivity as a WordPress developer.
Instead of just listing down the tools or just talking about how to install/configure them which anyone can find out easily by a simple web search, I talked about my experience using these tools and the reasons why I choose these tools.
Posted in Events/Conferences, WordPress Tagged Events/Conferences, Kochi, WordCamp 17 Comments
I use Vagrant with VVV extensively for setting up local development environments and have a couple of Vagrant boxes setup in my mac.
Recently I was running out of disk space in my Mac which prompted me to look around to see if there are any unnecessary files that can be cleaned up.
This let me to find out that Vagrant stores all versions of boxes that were downloaded even after upgrading them.
Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices Tagged Mac, Vagrant, VVV 8 Comments
2016 just ended (Let’s just pretend that I wrote this post 6 weeks ago 🙂 ) and like the last 8 years here is my year-end review post.
Usually I publish this at the beginning of the year, but this year had been crazy so far and I am publishing this after a delay of about 6 weeks. Better late than never right? 😉
Posted in Random/Personal Tagged Blogging, Books, Year End Stats 1 Comment
After my recent US Road Trip (I am yet to write about it, should write about it soon) I decided to spend the year end time off on a road trip covering historical and religious places around Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry instead of going to typical tourist places like Ooty, Kodaikanal etc.
I planned the trip such that I will be driving mostly along the coast, since I have a huge affinity to the ocean 🙂 Some of these historical places have confirmed recorded history dating back to more than 1800-1500 years and mentioned in religious texts from millennias ago.
In this trip I also wanted to visit some of the places mentioned in the famous Tamil historical fiction book Ponniyin Selvan.
I did the entire trip in my car (Ford Figo) with my wife and 3 year old son.
Here is my travel log in case you are planning to visit some of these places.
Posted in Travel/Trek Tagged Road Trip, travel 30 Comments
Just a quick note to let you all know that I have released v1.9.1 of my Email Log WordPress plugin that allows you to log every email that is sent from WordPress.
This released fixed a minor security bug that allows logged-in unprivileged users to view content of the logged email.
Since it is a security fix, it is a mandatory update.
Posted in WordPress Tagged Email Log, Plugin, release, WordPress 1 Comment
If you look at my Good Reads profile, you will know that I have read lot of fiction lately. I wanted to take a break and so I picked up Why Do Buses Come in Three: The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life by Robert Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham.
I came to know about this book through Good Read’s recommendation and added it to my to-read list probably a year ago. When I wanted to read a non-fiction book for a break I found it in my to-read list and immediately picked it up.
I found that alternating between fiction and non-fiction books is a nice way to read books from different genre and I have followed it up for the last couple of years.
Why Do Buses Come in Three: The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life tries to explain how Maths governs most of the things that we experience in everyday life. It answers some of the questions that we have everyday like why do buses come in threes (mentioned in the title), or why showers are always either too hot or too cold or why do clever people get things wrong etc using Maths.
In addition to answering these questions, the book also mentions the theory behind answers in simple terms.
The major thing that I learned from this book is that some times common sense (or intuition) may not be correct. It is either your brain trying to do an approximation (and failing miserably) or some clever marketer who is using statistics to lie to you 🙂
Some of the famous ones include
The other thing that I learned from this book are a couple of magic tricks based on Maths that were mentioned in the last chapter.
The main thing that I liked about this book is that it took most of the common day problems that pretty much everyone would have witnessed and then answered it using Maths. I found it very appealing since you can easily understand as you would have already experienced them.
The other thing that I liked about this book is that the answers were explained in very simple language which means you can understand most of them with very limited knowledge of Maths.
Also I liked the last chapter that had some magic tricks based on Maths that you can try with your friends 🙂
My rating for this book is 4 out of 5.
The only reason that I didn’t give 5 stars was because some of the theory that were mentioned in the book were not explained properly. I agree that this book was not about the theory, but I felt that some of it could either have been removed or explained a bit more.
After finishing the current set of fiction books that I am reading, I am planning to read No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald. The author is the reporter broke who broke the story about NSA surveillance scandal based on the documents released by Edward Snowden and in this book the author explores the extraordinary co-operation between private industry and the NSA, and the far-reaching consequences of the government’s surveillance program.
Sounds like an interesting read 🙂
Posted in Books Tagged Books, Maths, Review 3 Comments
I just released version 1.9 of my Email Log WordPress plugin. This released fixed an issue with pagination while viewing log files and various improvements at code level.
Email Log is a WordPress plugin that allows you to log every email sent through WordPress and provides a UI where you can view them. The logged emails can be searched based on date, email address or subject.
Posted in WordPress Tagged Email Log, Plugin, release, WordPress 4 Comments
Recently I came across a requirement at work where I had to find out if a particular post had pagination (page-breaks) and if yes then whether the user is on the last of those pages.
Even though this sounded simple, I had to dig into WordPress core source code to find out a way to solve it since there were no helper functions and you have to use global variables to figure it out.
I thought of writing about my findings here so that it would be helpful to others and I would also know where to look up when I need to do it again 🙂
Posted in WordPress Tagged Page Breaks, pagination, WordPress 3 Comments