_doing_it_wrong

Improving Your Development Skills Through Examining Bad Practices
Zack Tollman

Picture this: you wake up on Monday morning, head over to the WordPress plugin repository and download the plugin that purports to solve your WordPress woes. You, the ever cautious developer, install the plugin in your development site where you have all PHP error reporting turned on. After installing the plugin you find error after error reported all over your once lovely site. Clearly, the plugin developer is doing_it_wrong. Unfortunately, this is an all too common problem in the WordPress world. Zack will discuss some of the most common ways that developers are doing it wrong in the community in an effort to inspire them to “do it right.” Like the “_doing_it_wrong” function that inspires the name of this talk, Zack will point out what developers are doing wrong and how to do it right.

Zack’s talk will not be for the faint of heart. He will show ALOT of bad code; the kind of code that breaks layouts, throws console errors, melts databases and causes developers to lose sleep. An important part of education is learning from our mistakes, but due to the independent nature of many WordPress developers and lack of formal training experiences for WordPress development, there are not always good opportunities for mistakes to be revealed and corrected, especially the types of mistakes that are only revealed in the perfect situation. My goal with this presentation will be to call out bad practices that may go unnoticed unless the perfect situation reveals them. The proper standards and techniques for these situations will then be discussed.