A huge year in review for Pippin Williamson.

Over on Thoughtful Code I recently covered the topic of “rubber duck debugging.” It’s a pretty simple procedure but one I love because it works surprisingly well. Here are the basic steps:

Derek Sivers will get back to you tomorrow.

I’m not particularly into either npm (the JavaScript dependency library and installer) or cryptocoins (approximately “Bitcoins”), but I was talking some fellow WordPress developers and this pretty interesting and complex security story came up. The summary is this:

Writing as a proxy for “when do we work best”?

Black Friday is a great opportunity for WordPress products, but offering a straight discount isn’t necessarily the best way to go: you need to balance existing customers, price-sensitive potential customers, and deal-searchers, and a straight discount leaves at least one of those groups dissatisfied.

A sort-of goal of starting my Thoughtful Code hobby site was to use it it say a little more on theory than “here’s how to set up Java projects” or “here are five cool things you didn’t know about PHP.” I love articles like that (and should write more of them), but they don’t speak to the name or concept of what makes code worth writing and what makes it valuable to the word. And that’s something I think about a lot, both in our work here with WordPress, and with my role in Code for Fort Collins.

Last week I linked my piece on marketing channels, and the importance of testing new channels to see what works. This is a great write-up of a marketing channel experiment – YouTube sponsorships – and how it really didn’t work.

A member from the WPShout Facebook Group blew my mind last week with this set of instructions for either resetting WordPress user passwords or adding new users using only an FTP connection. This was in response to our Quick Guide that describes how to do the same thing inside phpMyAdmin, which requires cPanel (or similar) access. For many situations, I believe this FTP route is quite a bit simpler and requires requesting less complete access from your clients.

Alex on his marketing philosophy.