The Weekend It Was – Midsummer, Code, and The Lake

I’ll write about the whole weekend in one single post because I now have two new email subscribers! Thank you, it means a lot…

This weekend was about staying in the discomfort and coming out the other side.

Coding

WordPress Development

And the other side is really sublime, calm, and beautiful. I had been procrastinating on a large coding project for a while now. It was scary and seemed insurmountable. I did a little bit every now and then, but I thought that I could get it done in one major marathon-session. That never happened.

So, this weekend over two sessions, I got the project done. It’s for a WordPress theme and plugin for a non-profit organization, so that their members across the world can set up a new website with information pre-populated from a centralized store.

It was good to be writing PHP again. The plugin and theme architectures take a while to get used to, but I’m impressed by what I can do with the API.

Custom PHP Application

Last year, I started coding a basic web application so that people at my church can digitalize the readings used in our liturgical services.  A few weeks ago, the main user told me that he needs the link to the app. So, as I was about to re-send him the link, I discovered that there were some bugs in the app. (Read: the app didn’t work.)

I understand fully now why we have code reviews, pull requests, and documentation. The code made absolutely no sense to me. It could only speak to my state of mind (frazzled) last year.

An opportune time to bring in unit testing, I went straight to where the main bug was and see how I could fix it. It got messy. I installed and configured to use PHPUnit with phpunit-watcher. The lion share of my time was getting the unit tests to reference the code and play nicely with Composer’s autoloading.

When it finally did work.. I realized that this function was doing too much. Writing the unit test compelled to refactor it to this. It still needs more work, but the process taught me a lot.

Midsummer in Sweden

It was a delightful and beautiful time, watching the raising of the Midsummer pole and families dancing around.

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… took some videos, too

 

 

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