Recap from LoopConf 2017

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:

  1. Have a place to process through all the things I’m learning and document that process
  2. 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.

  1. Read through the code for the WP REST API that is now in core
  2. Implement code reviews into our development process at Endo Creative
  3. Write unit tests for the plugins that I develop
  4. Use the WP REST API instead of admin-ajax
  5. Use the WordPress Coding Standards with PHP_CodeSniffer in my code editor and with Travis CI
  6. Review and follow the WordPress VIP Code Review guidelines in my WordPress projects
  7. Spend time learning React, even if its just to have a high level view of how it works
  8. Spend time developing outside of the WordPress ecosystem, and then bring what I learn back to my WordPress development
  9. Develop custom WP CLI commands for one off PHP scripts that I need to run in a WordPress environment
  10. Further my understanding of OOP and how that can be used in WordPress development

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