Ross's Micro Blog

Hot take: Corporate laptops should come with text-expansion for in-house abbreviations and acronyms by default.

Today I've got up Issue 2 of Beyond WP on the archive.

This one was my take on Tailwind CSS.

https://beyond-wp.com/archive/beyond-wp-2-trick-or-treat-making-tailwind-css-less-scary

It's the Tailwind CSS article that I wish I'd had when I started out with it.

Because, in my opinion, the examples in all the courses and tutorials tend to be either way too simple, or to miss the point of Tailwind which is: Componentize All The Things!!

Enjoy!

Oh. I made the mistake of sharing a post with a hyperlink in it on The Social Network Formerly Known as Twitter, didn't I?

Zero engagement there then.

Who knows… maybe once the archive is up, I'll get back to Beyond WP properly? I loved the research and writing. And I still think it has value. I still want to bridge #WordPress development to broader software development tooling and topics. Not enough people are doing this.

I had a half-written post on xDebug that I wanted to get out. Because no one (IMO) explains xDebug properly.

And I am still internally screaming about many WP dev’s using structured arrays everywhere!!

You can skip the first couple of emails from my “Beyond WP" newsletter. (They are preserved for posterity anyway).

The first real issue was about local development tooling.

https://beyond-wp.com/archive/beyond-wp-1-local-dev-setups-and-no-pressure

I raved about Laravel Valet. But there was a bunch of links to resources and tools that let you explore the options by yourself.

I've added some new tools as updates like WP Engine's Local, @nicoverbruggen's PHP Monitor and Laravel Herd.

Perhaps something new for you to try here?

#WordPress

Back in the pandemic times, I set up a newsletter called “Beyond WP” that sought to bring tools and ideas from the broader web/software development world to #WordPress developers.

I quickly ran out of steam – which I'm sad about.

But those emails took time to write. I got good feedback on them, and I was proud of them. So I'm working to get an archive online (with notes on what has changed since writing).

https://beyond-wp.com/archive/

This Cloudflare outage is really something. I’ve worked alongside data center operations and I’ve seen multiple-redundant systems fail in chaotic ways like this. It’s so hard to predict. And yet, stuff like “they needed to be physically accessed … access control system was not powered by the battery backups, so it was offline” is such an obvious design flaw with hindsight.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-on-cloudflare-control-plane-and-analytics-outage/

Finally getting round to putting the archive of my Beyond WP emails online.

I’d sad it had such short a run.

I think I set my standards too high.

Perhaps I will pick it up again someday.

I like writing.

I really want to work on a PHP code base with tests and types again.

Wrangle some data and APIs.

Try out Tinkerwell v4

What can I make?

I dressed up as a UDP packet
for Halloween. But the kids didn’t get it.

Best I could do.

Sorry.

Not sorry.

Nooo Cloudflare Pages… not today!!!

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/l6x2h1zp69bc

Honestly.

How hard is it?

“Thanks for your specific feedback. We can see how we can do better. We will try to do as you ask in future.”

It’s all I want sometimes.

This is a great article on getting started in web development.

The author is clearly wise and reflective beyond her years.

“What I Wish I Knew About Working In Development Right Out Of School” https://smashingmagazine.com/2023/10/beginner-web-development-working-career/

Yay! NASA released another issue of their educational graphic AR comic thing about the first woman going to the moon.

The first one was good.

https://www.nasa.gov/calliefirst/

I just added some link preloading-on-hover to my blog (if the network conditions are right). Makes it seem super fast!

And if you have view-transitions on it will be nice and smooth too.

https://rosswintle.uk/

Have added upcoming #PHP v8.3 features to https://caniphp.com now too.

Yay!

https://caniphp.com/ now has a complete set of PHP 8.2 features/functions/methods.

On to PHP 8.3 in time for next month's release.

(I'm doing this because I'm ill and I'm in bed doing boring things. Not so yay! So send hugs/sympathy, or if you like Can I PHP? you can also buy me a coffee/Lemsip):

https://ko-fi.com/magicroundabout

Remembering.

If we don't remember, we don't have empathy.

https://rosswintle.uk/2023/10/remembering/