Category: software

How I build software

At various times in my professional life I have been someone who builds software, someone who leads other people who build software, someone who sells and translates the power of custom software to clients, someone who supports the work of people who build software, and someone who tests software as a user. Each role has its joys and challenges, but I've realized that so far I find building software to be the most fun and rewarding of all of them.

This post is about some of the thinking behind how I build software and the processes I've found to work best over time:

At the end I've also included links to some books and other reading about software development that I've found useful.

Great blueprints make great buildings

There's such a thing as too much planning, but it's rarely something you find in the world of software development. Most people (myself included) who have an idea for a tool, app or other piece of software want to see their vision rendered into a working thing as soon as possible. The excitement about building often drowns out any concern for the details of what to build and how to build it.

But I know from experience that if the person who wants the software thing built (the client) is not the same as the person actually building it (the developer), there will almost always be a gap to close between each others` understanding of process, milestones, expectations and criteria for success. Even something as simple as "a website that takes a single text input and displays a message based on that input" can be reasonably interpreted and implemented a hundred different ways.

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My everyday apps

This may be one of those posts that no one other than me cares about, but I've been meaning to take a snapshot of the software tools I use on a daily basis right now, and how they're useful to me. (This comes at a time when I'm considering a major OS change in my life -- more on that later -- so as a part of that I need to inventory these tools anyway.)

So every day when I get up and stretch my arms in front of my energy inefficient, eye-strain-causing big blue wall screen with a cloud in the middle, grumbling to myself that we now call things "apps" instead of programs or software or really any other name, I see:

Airmail 3 - my main tool for reading, sorting, sending and finding email across a few different accounts. Replaced Thunderbird with it a few years back, really good choice.

Chrome - on the desktop, my daily browser of choice. I tried the new Firefox recently and liked it, but not enough to switch. I have lots of extensions installed but some favorites are Adblock Plus, JSONView and XML Tree, Momentum, Pinboard Tools, Postman, Signal Private Messenger, Vanilla Cookie Manager, Xdebug helper and Web Developer. On mobile I use iOS Safari.

macOS and iOS Calendar and Contacts - works with all of the various online calendars and address books I sync to, have stayed pretty intelligent and user-friendly without getting too cluttered.

Todoist - for task management and keeping my brain clear of things I care about but don't want to have to remember.

Slack - for communicating with my co-workers and others. I have accounts on 11 different Slack instances, and only stay logged in to about 4 of those at once.

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WordCamp for Publishers Denver

I'm excited to be a part of the team that is organizing the first WordCamp for Publishers happening in Denver, Colorado this coming August 17th to 19th.

In my work on Automattic's VIP service offering I've been able to see some of the incredible things that journalists and publications of all types are doing with WordPress - really interesting stuff that pushes the software in new directions. So when I saw some of my colleagues discussing an event that would bring engineering, product and editorial teams together around all the things WordPress can do in the publishing world (for publications big and small), I wanted to be a part of making it happen.

We're looking for speakers and sponsors now. If you know someone who might want to be a part of this first-of-a-kind event, please point them in our direction. And if you're involved in publishing with WordPress at any scale, or just want to learn about how media organizations are using it to modernize their publishing  workflow, I hope you'll consider attending. Tickets ($40) will go on sale soon!

Creating a private website with WordPress

When we became parents in 2015, Kelly and I talked about where and how we wanted to share the initial photos and stories of that experience with a small group of our family and friends. In case you haven't noticed, I feel pretty strongly about the principle of owning our digital homes. So I felt resistance to throwing everything up on Facebook in hopes that we'd always be able to make their evolving privacy and sharing settings and policies work for us, while also trusting that every single Facebook friend would honor our wishes about re-sharing that information.

I took some time to explore tools available for creating a private website that would be relatively easy for our users to access, relatively easy to maintain, and still limited in how accessible the content would be to the wider world. (I tend to assume that all information connected to the Internet will eventually become public, so I try to avoid ever thinking in terms of absolute privacy when it comes to websites of any kind.)

I thought about using WordPress.com, which offers the ability to quickly create a site that is private and viewable only by invited users while maintaining full ownership and control of the content. I passed on this idea in part because it didn't allow quite the level of feature customization that I wanted, and partly because it's a service of my employer, Automattic. While I fully trust my colleagues to be careful and sensitive to semi-private info stored there, it felt a little strange to think of creating something a bit vulnerable and intended for a small group of people within that context. I would still highly recommend the WordPress.com option for anyone looking for a simple, free/low-cost solution to get started.

Here are the WordPress tools I ended up using, with a few notes on my customizations:

Basic WordPress Configuration

For the basic WordPress installation and configuration, I made the following setup choices:

  • I put the site on a private, dedicated server so that I had control over the management and maintenance of the site software (as opposed to a shared server where my content, files or database may be accessible to others).
  • I used a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate and forced all traffic to the SSL version of the site, to ensure all communication and access would be encrypted.
  • I set up a child theme of a default WordPress theme so I could add a few customizations that would survive future parent theme updates.
  • I set "Membership" so that "Anyone can register" in the role of Subscriber (see more below on why this is okay).
  • For Search Engine Visibility I set "Discourage search engines from indexing this site".
  • For discussion I set "

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Using Todoist to organize all the things

For just over two years now I've been using Todoist as my primary to-do list manager and personal organizer software. I pay for the upgraded Premium version at US$28.99/year. I really like it and it's helped me stay on top of all the things I want to get done in my professional life, personal life, local community and beyond.

(Before Todoist, I'd been using Taskpaper and loved the simplicity of its interface and file storage. The software hit a period of being unmaintained and I really needed something up to date, so I switched. Taskpaper has since seen new life as a project, it's worth checking it out again too.)

The Todoist website linked above already showcases many of its features so I won't bother repeating those, but here are a few of the things I especially appreciate:

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Preparing to have my wallet stolen

This post is from the "random life-hacks department."

I don't like worrying about losing my wallet. I don't really carry anything of great significance in it...little or no cash, some ID, and a few credit cards. But in the past I also knew that if I lost it or if it was stollen, I'd spend some anxious time trying to remember exactly what was in it, and then even more time searching around for the right phone number to call to get things canceled and replaced.

And it felt like there were more important things to worry about.

Ever since I started using 1Password, I don't worry about this as much any more.

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Dispatches from my Internet of Things

A few years ago I noticed that a couple of different tools and services I was using at the time were offering the option to tweet when I engaged with them somehow. I was interested to try it out but I didn't want to clutter up my human-authored Twitter feed with a bunch of software-authored stuff that I couldn't necessarily control the timing or content of.

So, I created the @JCHThings Twitter account, and it's been a steady stream of activity from the Internet-connected devices and tools in my life ever since.

Sometimes it shares some bad news:

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Let's Encrypt SSL certificates on cPanel hosted sites

SSL is one of the most important technologies in use on the modern web. It enables all kinds of business, collaboration, commerce, activism and communication to happen securely, and the Internet couldn't thrive without it.  Yet for the average person, alongside domain name registration and management, obtaining and renewing SSL certificates has always been one of the least accessible and convenient parts of having a website.

So I was particularly proud when a year ago my employer Automattic became a sponsor of the Let's Encrypt initiative and even more proud earlier this month when we rolled out free SSL for all domains hosted on WordPress.com, using Let's Encrypt certificates. All of the sudden a huge portion of the world's websites were using SSL to make sure communications between site owners and users are encrypted and secure - amazing!

Let's Encrypt is itself pretty amazing. A bunch of industry experts got together and decided it was time to make the process of obtaining SSL certificates free, automatic, secure, transparent, open and cooperative. This is a long way from what it looked like in the late 1990s, when just a few "certificate authority" options existed, you could expect to pay $100 or more for a certificate, and the application process was painfully slow and analog (think faxing your corporate articles of organization and a photocopy of your driver's license to a call center somewhere), and that's all before you had to mess around with recompiling or reconfiguring Apache to use SSL on your site(s). Even with Let's Encrypt and other modern options some of the concepts and steps remain too technical for many site owners to tackle, but it's getting better all the time.

I'm used to paying around $10/year for SSL certificates on a few of my personal sites, and I actually haven't minded that price point given that the rest of the process has been pretty easy for me to manage. But I recently decided to try using a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate on a site that didn't have one yet, and I'm sharing the steps involved here.

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Theme dev with Bones, Sass, Vagrant and PhpStorm

I recently played around with building a new WordPress theme from the ground up, and I'm sharing some notes here about what I learned along the way.

It had been a while since I'd created a WordPress theme from nothing, and I knew that best practices had shifted quite a bit since then. I also wanted to use a more modern development workflow than I'd previously been used to. In my daily work I get to help our clients test, refactor, optimize and launch their WordPress themes (and I enjoy that quite a bit), but sometimes I just want to tinker for a personal project.

I also had an itch to scratch with 47374.info, a site I'd created in 2011 to aggregate local news headlines into a single, simple list display. It uses the great FeedWordPress plugin (along with some custom Perl scripts I wrote to scrape news off of local sites that embarrassingly don't offer their own RSS feeds) and does its job just fine, but it wasn't responsive, the mobile theme wasn't working so well for this use case, and there were more and more parts of the original theme I'd used that needed cleaning up. I also wanted to create something that looked and worked a little bit more like the Hacker News front page (without voting or comments). I am my own primary target user here; the site in question tends to get 40-60 visitors per day (I hope you're enjoying it, whoever you are), but I know I use it every single day.

I didn't quite have the time to start with a totally blank slate, so I started looking at some of the starter themes out there: Underscores, Components, Minimum Viable VIP, and Bones were the main ones I considered. These starter themes include all of the basic requirements of a WordPress theme so you don't have to literally create each new file (like single.php and style.css from scratch). Each option then offers its own unique flavor to what a starter theme should have. For example, the Minimum Viable VIP theme is designed to have everything a developer on the WordPress.com VIP platform would need to implement basic functionality while also meeting code security and performance standards on our platform.

In my case, mobile-first and responsive was a top goal, and while Components has some great options there, Bones seemed to take care of what I wanted with a little less extra stuff thrown in. (Some day I will learn to write media queries from scratch, not this time around.)

So I downloaded Bones, opened it up, and started poking around. And that's when I encountered this:

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