One of the first and most powerful lessons I learned while teaching myself to code a decade ago was to read/listen/watch widely. I believe it is one of the most powerful choices you can make in learning to code (or in almost any endeavor). Because broader minds (ones which have been exposed to more things) are often *way* better problem-solvers than narrower ones. Because the solution space they can conceive is just so much bigger. But that’s enough “David’s Life Philosophy” for now.

Our friend Carl Alexander wrote a (possibly) inflammatory but true argument for Delicious Brains this week. It reflects a lot of thoughts I’ve had as I’ve spent the last few years as one of the small minority of people trying to span the roles of  “WordPress” and “modern PHP” developer. In short, he’s said all I’ve thought in a fair, even handed, and useful way. While action is hardly guaranteed, helping to reach a public consensus about the state of WordPress PHP is the first step in evolving toward making it a modern PHP project (if that’s ever desired by enough of the right people, of course).

I really enjoyed reviewing this post from Steve Burge over at PublishPress (whose plugin we recently published a Quick Guide about). What he covers is the dream of Google Docs-style collaboration in WordPress’s native post editor. As he highlights, this is something that Matt Mullenweg has kind of committed the WordPress project to, and a great feature for us all if/when it arrives.

I’ve never really been someone who contributed to WordPress in a disciplined and direct way. (Which is to say, I’ve never had code I’ve written pulled into the WordPress project.) As a result, I can’t really say what the cognitive landscape of doing that is like. Which is precisely why I found this article from Alain Schlesser (best known to me for his work on WP-CLI) so interesting.

I have a great deal of interest in and respect for Ben Thompson, the proprietor of Statechery, one of the most interesting “tech industry analyst” publications I’ve come across. So this interview he did with John O’Nolan, the founder of Ghost, was quite interesting.

So, Chome 76 (or later. But what version of Chrome am I running anyway?) is getting a feature that would have saved me at least a little work on a few client projects. That is, it’s making lazy-loading of images and iframes as easy as:

The weirdest piece of email I’ve gotten all month was courtesy of Brian Krogsgard and the Post Status newsletter: Automattic (owner of WordPress.com, Jetpack, Akismet, WooCommerce…) has just bought blogging giant Tumblr.

Reviewing the SEO of small business websites.

A very good guide to the work philosophy I swear by.

This week I’m running a (my first ever) fundraiser for a non-profit where I do a lot of volunteer work, Code for Fort Collins. And I figured it make sense to share it pretty widely. And that may as well include right here on WPShout.