I just attended LoopConf 2017 in Salt Lake City. As a conference geared toward developers in the WordPress space, I was excited to see what other developers in the industry were doing. As a business owner and lead developer at a boutique development agency, I don’t get a lot of exposure to other developers outside of Twitter and blog posts.
I have made it one of my focuses this year to level up my development skills. I’ve been developing full time for the past 6 years, learning new techniques with every project and plugin I build. I feel pretty confident in my development skills, however, I know there’s always more to learn.
My hope is to document more of what I learn this year and accomplish two main goals:
- Have a place to process through all the things I’m learning and document that process
- Help others learn from my mistakes and successes
With that, here are the top 10 things I heard at LoopConf that I want to start implementing in my own work, or spend time leveling up on this year.
- Read through the code for the WP REST API that is now in core
- Implement code reviews into our development process at Endo Creative
- Write unit tests for the plugins that I develop
- Use the WP REST API instead of admin-ajax
- Use the WordPress Coding Standards with PHP_CodeSniffer in my code editor and with Travis CI
- Review and follow the WordPress VIP Code Review guidelines in my WordPress projects
- Spend time learning React, even if its just to have a high level view of how it works
- Spend time developing outside of the WordPress ecosystem, and then bring what I learn back to my WordPress development
- Develop custom WP CLI commands for one off PHP scripts that I need to run in a WordPress environment
- Further my understanding of OOP and how that can be used in WordPress development