Perusing Digg, I came across a post that outlines a set of twenty questions that interviewers should ask their candidates for web development positions. I thought it would be fun to see how I would answer these questions. Here we go...
What industry sites and blogs do you read regularly?
None religiously. Great ideas don't always come from the most respected names in the business. You'll find that every now and then, something new and interesting will come from someone previously unknown. That's why you have to have your fingers on the pulse of the web, and know how to sip from the firehose of new web tech.
That said, I do monitor QuirksBlog and have occasion to peruse ALA periodically. Also, I have in my aggregator a bunch of folks who keep tabs on these things pretty well. Combined with some good PubSub subscriptions and the Digg/del.icio.us/Slashdot filtering I do, I get a good feel for what's going on.
Do you prefer to work alone or on a team?
It depends on what the project is. It only makes sense that if it's a very small project, I would expect not to have to coordinate with five other developers. Also, I prefer to focus on coding over design if possible, so a team of developer (me) and designer (someone else) suits me great. more
A recent thread about Nightly Builds of WordPress has me kind of foaming (darn you, Doug!), and rather than take it out on unsuspecting members of the list (and then get flamed back for it), I figured I would write about it here, where it's safe, and I can delete comments that contradict me. (Did I just say that?)
Yes. There are dozens of open source applications that will perform a specific function instead of the commercial application that is well-known for it. Indeed, there are many replacements for WinZip (the software in question in the linked thread) that are free, and some are even open source. But there are also dozens of closed source applications that work just as well.
People frequently ask, "Why are you supporting that commercial application, when there is this open-source application that works just as well?" Well, there are a few good answers to that, the first, and possibly not the most obvious, is -- Why not? more
With the looming release of WordPress 2.0, there are a bunch of folks that are submitting bug fixes that say things like, "I would submit this to Trac, but I don't know how."
I think even more people are suggesting that writing to the mailing list with their bugs to "confirm" them is better than submitting them directly to Trac. I suppose if you're not sure something is a bug, it might be worthwhile to ask someone else (I would ask on IRC at #wordpress on irc.freenode.net) but it really is better to have a formal record of an issue, even if it turns out that what you're experiencing is expected behavior. If you really fear that it's something to do specifically with your installation, check on IRC or maybe try a fresh install.
Nevertheless, it might be useful to folks to learn how I do it. I'm not saying my method is correct, just that it seems to get the job done with few complaints from the devs who commit my patches. It's also a good method to use on Windows. (Sorry, someone else can document command-line Subversion use - not that I don't know it, I'm just lazy.) Here we go... more
Advnaced users of WordPress may be familiar with WordPress' Subversion (SVN) access. SVN allows the WordPress developers to work on code and aggregate the changes in a single location so that the software can be deployed. The most fresh version of WordPress is always available via SVN.
Unfortunately for users who have pre-configured their servers to use the latest stable version of the code, the trunk (typically the part of the SVN repository containing the latest development) is no longer the last stable version.
To get the latest 1.5 code, you'll need to run:...
more
Perusing Digg, I came across a post that outlines a set of twenty questions that interviewers should ask their candidates for web development positions. I thought it would be fun to see how I would answer these questions. Here we go...
What industry sites and blogs do you read regularly?
None religiously. Great ideas don't always come from the most respected names in the business. You'll find that every now and then, something new and interesting will come from someone previously unknown. That's why you have to have your fingers on the pulse of the web, and know how to sip from the firehose of new web tech.
That said, I do monitor QuirksBlog and have occasion to peruse ALA periodically. Also, I have in my aggregator a bunch of folks who keep tabs on these things pretty well. Combined with some good PubSub subscriptions and the Digg/del.icio.us/Slashdot filtering I do, I get a good feel for what's going on.
Do you prefer to work alone or on a team?
It depends on what the project is. It only makes sense that if it's a very small project, I would expect not to have to coordinate with five other developers. Also, I prefer to focus on coding over design if possible, so a team of developer (me) and designer (someone else) suits me great. more
