5 Important Skills To Learn As A Programmer

Posted on by chrisbrosnan

Importance of non-coding skills As programmers we write code to create scripts and programs as whole or part of wider websites, applications and software. So the “skills” we learn are often the skills in specific programming languages and frameworks or libraries. But what are the other skills that we must learn to be effective programmers? […]

It’s not “gatekeeping” or elitist to uphold standards and correct disinformation

Posted on by chrisbrosnan

I have seen a worrying trend recently among corners of the web and software development community. This trend is the accusation of elitism and “gatekeeping” towards members of our profession who may for good reason be correcting incorrect use of terminology or poor practices and standards among other, often newer members to the profession. Worse […]

5 Things that will waste your time as a developer

Posted on by chrisbrosnan

There are many things that for developers can waste time in completing their projects or maintaining them in the long run. These mistakes are committed by developers of all levels of experience and are by far not exclusive to junior members of our profession. I have definitely been guilty of such mistakes myself. 1. Building […]

How to build a custom Magento 2 module

Posted on by chrisbrosnan

In the context of Magento, modules are small programs that you can build that extends functionality within your Magento project. They can become very complex but share several characteristics in their construction. Here I will show you how to build a basic ‘Hello World!’ module with Magento. Magento is based primarily on PHP in an […]

My 10 best open source software alternatives

Posted on by chrisbrosnan

I am a huge fan of open source software. Aside from this software being free the vast majority of the time, it is also often the case that these examples of software have been lovingly built by international communities and where commercial value and cost is not a factor, we often find that the only […]

WordPress or Laravel – Why not both?

Posted on by chrisbrosnan

Earlier this year I gave a talk at WordCamp London 2019. My talk was titled WordPress or Laravel: Why Not Both? and its focus was on building a Laravel application with WordPress being used as a headless CMS. I have based this blog post on my talk. Brief Introduction to Laravel: Laravel is an open […]

My review of: October CMS

Posted on by chrisbrosnan

When I recently decided to relaunch my blog, I decided I did not want to opt for WordPress, which is what I previously used. I preferred to choose something very lightweight and developer focused so that I could build the functionality I required on top of it and not focus on removing or disabling elements […]

Create a custom taxonomy in WordPress

Posted on by chrisbrosnan

Custom taxonomies can be used in WordPress to organise posts and custom post types similarly to how posts are organised into categories. In fact categories are a type of taxonomy to organise posts. An example of a custom taxonomy may be a ‘genre’ taxonomy to organise review posts, or a ‘location’ taxonomy to organise listings […]