Press the Issue a MasterWP Podcast

Things New WP Developers Should Remember

New WordPress developers inherently lack the perspective of time. This can lead to being too focused on the right now, the urgent, and sometimes the frightening. In this episode, Topher and Devin offer that perspective and advice to help new developers relax and enjoy their journey.

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Things New WP Developers Should Remember
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Monet Davenport:
Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for Master WP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue. New WordPress developers inherently lack the perspective of ti...

Monet Davenport:
Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for Master WP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue. New WordPress developers inherently lack the perspective of time. This can lead to being too focused on the right now, the urgent, and sometimes the frightening. In this episode, Topher and Devin offer that perspective and advice to help new developers relax and enjoy their journey.

Devin Egger:
Welcome to Master WP Podcast, this is Devin, and I’m with Topher.

Topher DeRosia:
Howdy, howdy.

Devin Egger:
Hey, Topher. How are you doing today?

Topher DeRosia:
Doing really awesome, I’m here with you.

Devin Egger:
Hey. Cheers, hey, well, today we’re here to talk about things that beginner WordPress developers should remember as they’re growing and as they’re heading down the path of becoming a WordPress developer.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah, don’t forget anything, remember it all.

Devin Egger:
Cram it all in.

Topher DeRosia:
Don’t be intimidated.

Devin Egger:
And what’s great here is Topher’s got an awesome background in WordPress and just development in general. Go ahead and just give us a little backstory on where you started with your WordPress journey and development and all that.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah, I started out with HTML in ’95 and PHP/FI which came before 2.0. There wasn’t a 1.0. And did PHP, MySQL stuff through the 2000s. And then in 2010, WordPress 3.0 came out with custom post types and I said, “Hey, look at that.” And I dove in and I never looked back and spent the next, oh, 10 or 11 years doing WordPress development. And then in just the last year or so have moved away, not two years, have moved away from development and into other things: sales, marketing, all kinds of stuff.

Devin Egger:
Nice.

Topher DeRosia:
And how about you? What are you doing?

Devin Egger:
Right now I’m a developer, just a good old WordPress developer, and I’ve been doing WordPress development for around seven, eight years now. And started off also with HTML, PHP, MySQL, and kind of similarly, when I first saw custom post types and figured out what those were and saw what you could do with that and advanced custom feels, everything clicked with WordPress. And I said, “Oh, you can do anything with this.” And being a database guy from the start, once you realize that and you go, “Oh, well, I have full access to the database. Okay, great. Now we’re good.” So it’s amazing just how the custom post types kind of just opens the door for WordPress developers and all of a sudden that just makes everything makes sense, and kind of makes what we do possible.

Topher DeRosia:
Oh yeah.

Devin Egger:
So today what we’re supposed to be talking about is what beginner WordPress developers should remember along their journey. And you and I have been talking about this for a little while now, and we’ve put together a little bit of a list of things that we think are important, and we’re just going to go through that. So first on the list is-

Topher DeRosia:
Wait. Do you know what?

Devin Egger:
What?

Topher DeRosia:
I just thought of something we didn’t-

Devin Egger:
No problem. What’s going on?

Topher DeRosia:
… So I’m sidetracking.

Devin Egger:
Yeah.

Topher DeRosia:
I want to talk about why we’re talking about these things that you should remember.

Devin Egger:
Okay, good point.

Topher DeRosia:
And honestly, many of them on this list are things that I forgot and then remembered. And so we want to leverage our years of experience-

Devin Egger:
And then forgot, and then remembered.

Topher DeRosia:
… To help you remember them so you don’t have to forget them, or not as often as we did.

Devin Egger:
Yeah, or spend as much time forgetting them.

Topher DeRosia:
Yep.

Devin Egger:
Good point. Good point. Thanks for bringing it around full circle and bringing the why into it.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Devin Egger:
Cool. So first on the list, let’s talk about the old stuff and the new stuff. So what we mean by that is, make sure to pay attention to the new stuff as it’s coming in. And we’re in a huge time of that. There’s a lot of new stuff coming in, full site editing, Gutenberg, WebP images, and there’s all sorts of new stuff coming in. And I think the important part about that is that a lot of times when new stuff is introduced to the ecosystem is to make our lives easier. So if you get all just stuck in your rut of doing your thing the same old way every time and don’t look at the new stuff, then you’re missing out on these things that could end up making your life easier. What do you think, Topher?

Topher DeRosia:
Oh yeah. Absolutely. And I have had both success and failure with that. WordPress was one of them for me. One of the things that came out, it had been out for a while, but before I got into WordPress, I was building custom admin backends for every website, which is lame. WordPress came out and I spent the time to learn it. It took me six to 12 months to get really comfortable and it changed everything. And it was amazing. Gutenberg is designed to make your life easier. All of us, every single one of us had so much muscle memory with TinyMCE and everything that going to anything newer was hard. I kept hearing anecdotes that said, I put 10 new people in front of WordPress and they tried Gutenberg and they all loved it, and it was super easy. And all of us oldsters were like, “What? It’s terrible. How could it be easy?” And it’s because we needed to take the time to learn the new stuff, get into it and get rolling.

Devin Egger:
And it improves with time, right?

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah. But by the same token, the other thing on our list is don’t forget the old stuff. I still to this day, am using Gutenberg. Click the view source icon and load it with HTML sometimes.

Devin Egger:
Oh, totally. Yeah.

Topher DeRosia:
Because HTML is it. That’s the web. If it’s not HTML, it’s not the web.

Devin Egger:
Right. And things like the advanced custom fields and custom post types, those things aren’t going away.

Topher DeRosia:
No.

Devin Egger:
And-

Topher DeRosia:
They have a place and they’re powerful.

Devin Egger:
… And as you know, as a podcast that is geared towards beginner WordPress developers, that’s a good point to make, is that when behind the scenes almost everything is custom post types.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Devin Egger:
When you’re using a plugin and it’s making a slideshow or something like that, those are probably custom post types.

Devin Egger:
So pay attention to the new stuff. And even if it’s tricky or is not what you want to be right at first, it’s going to change. It’s going to get better. It’s there to help your life most of the time, to make your life easier. But also, don’t forget about the old stuff. There’s a lot of good stuff out there. And WordPress is… One of the key features to WordPress is its ecosystem, the things that have been there. I mean, shoot, I don’t build a website without redirection or better search and replace. So those things that are there, they’re there for a reason. Okay. Topher, what’s the next one? This one was a big one from you.

Topher DeRosia:
The next one? Someone has already figured it out.

Devin Egger:
Yep.

Topher DeRosia:
It’s related to the old saying, if you’re in WordPress, there’s probably a plugin for it. There’s a reason… Oh, now that we’re now recording, I can’t remember the name of it.

Devin Egger:
CSS Tricks?

Topher DeRosia:
Nope. But that one will work. There’s a reason those sites exist.

Devin Egger:
Yes.

Topher DeRosia:
Somebody-

Devin Egger:
Stack overflow?

Topher DeRosia:
Yes, Stack Overflow.

Devin Egger:
The thing that we owe all of our jobs to.

Topher DeRosia:
That’s right.

Devin Egger:
I remember I saw a meme once that was along the lines of Stack Overflow’s down for the day. Oh, well there goes my job.

Topher DeRosia:
Yep.

Devin Egger:
Yeah, I mean, I can’t tell you the number of times that I have just spent way too much time trying to build something myself or trying to figure something out without looking it up, just because I think I should be able to figure it out, or thinking that it just may not be documented. And sure enough, it’s there if you just spent a little bit, if I just spent a little bit more time looking for it, it’s there. In fact, what was the one thing that I just did? I think just today actually, it’s not necessarily WordPress related, but it is for us, is it was a bootstrap thing. I spent a bunch of time building a background gradient and making a class so that I could just put a background gradient in as a class. And I went and looked this morning on Bootstrap’s documentation and right there in the documentation is just a way to do it, straight with Bootstrap. And that would’ve been nice. That would’ve been real nice.

Topher DeRosia:
So the lesson is, look around for probably longer than you think you should because there’s probably an answer. But I got to say, there will be a few times in your life when you are the very first person to figure something out and it’s exhilarating.

Devin Egger:
It is.

Topher DeRosia:
That is… Oh, there is no feeling like it. I have just a couple of snippets on my blog from long ago where I searched for days or weeks and found nothing and I wrote something that did it. And I’m like, “Hey world, now someone has.” It’s a pretty great feeling, so don’t be afraid to try stuff too. But if you’re on the clock and you got to get it done, somebody’s probably done it.

Devin Egger:
Look for it.

Topher DeRosia:
Just look around.

Devin Egger:
Stop bashing your head against the desk. Just Google it.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Devin Egger:
Sage advice. So next one on the list is sleep.

Topher DeRosia:
Sleep.

Devin Egger:
If it’s three in the morning and you’re still hammering away at the same function and it’s not working, stop. Put it away. Go to bed.

Topher DeRosia:
Yep.

Devin Egger:
You’d be amazed at what sleep can do for your retention and for fresh set of eyes. I can’t tell you the number of times where I’ve been in the middle of whatever, six, eight, 10, 12 hour development session and I think that I just need to get it done tonight or else I’m going to lose my momentum or what have you, whatever crazy thing is in my over caffeinated brain at that moment. And really the next day I finally give up, go to sleep. The next day I look at it and oh, I just named the variable wrong. Or, “Oh look, there’s a missing semicolon right there.”

Topher DeRosia:
20 minutes. Not only that, the times you saw it while sleeping.

Devin Egger:
Right.

Topher DeRosia:
I have solved any number of coding problems in my dreams.

Devin Egger:
You wake up with that eureka moment.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Devin Egger:
“I’ve got it.”

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Devin Egger:
You ever do it where like, you’ve actually decided to put it to bed for a minute and you go to bed and you’re on your way out to sleep-

Topher DeRosia:
Leap out of bed.

Devin Egger:
And then all of a sudden, “I got it. I know.”

Topher DeRosia:
And it’s not just overnight, naps help.

Devin Egger:
They do.

Topher DeRosia:
I think it has something to do, not just with the act of sleeping, but how much sleep you need. I tend to get sleepy in the afternoon and my work suffers. And so I used to try to push through. I’m like, “Oh, I’ll drink something with caffeine. I’ll eat something. I’ll get up and I’ll walk around and I’ll be fine.” But I’ve learned that when I start to get sleepy, stop, go to bed. 20 minutes and I’m better. And it helps. You are a better coder when you have good sleep. But at the same token, it’s not always about the sleep. I’ve solved an awful lot of coding problems standing in the shower. And I’ll be just standing there under the hot water staring at the wall for like 10 minutes and I realize, “Oh hey, I should probably shower or something while I’m in here.” But I solved the problem and I’ve solved problems fishing. My father-in-law likes to fish, and we’ll go out and we don’t really talk. We just sitting together in a boat for three hours and I’ll turn and look at him and go, “Oh, I figured it out.”

Devin Egger:
I’ve done that a few times on longer road trips and I’ll just all of a sudden look at my wife and go, “I’ve got it. I know exactly how I’m going to do this.”

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Devin Egger:
She’s like, “What? Wait, what? Get off the interstate? What are you talking about?” I’m like, “No-”

Topher DeRosia:
You need me to pull over?

Devin Egger:
“… No, I know how I’m going to do this problem. I’ve been going through it in my head for the last two hours.” So I guess, what’s the end all be all of that point? Take your mind away from the what seems to be the problem at hand and find a way to relax. Find a way to separate yourself from the anxiety of figuring it out. And a lot of times the answer does just come to you as much as it may seem like it’s not going to. A lot of times the answer just comes to you, whether you’re fishing or playing golf or showering.

Topher DeRosia:
You’re subconscious will keep working on it.

Devin Egger:
Like it or not. I guess of course, showering is probably a good tip and a piece of advice just in general. Especially for hygiene.

Topher DeRosia:
Yes.

Devin Egger:
Especially for those-

Topher DeRosia:
I’ve been coding for three days. We can tell, go shower.

Devin Egger:
Exactly. Especially for those of us who are working from home. And yeah, that’s a real tip. Do it. Sleep, shower. But in general, give your mind a break to step away from the problem. And a lot of times you will be able to solve it just by letting go of it.

Monet Davenport:
Thank you for listening up to this point. Press The Issue by Master WP is sponsored by Learn Dash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with Learn Dash, visit learndash.com. Our mission at Master WP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new Master WP Workshop series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code to design to business turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts. Find the workshop for you at workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code podcast10 for a 10% discount. Now back to the podcast.

Devin Egger:
Next piece of advice is don’t be afraid to jump into something new. This is kind of a spin off from the first one. And don’t be intimidated by things that have changed and new things and Topher, in our initial conversations on this, and I think both of us have had points in our career where there’s a new way of doing things and it’s just very intimidating and it can really put you off your game for a long, long time.

Topher DeRosia:
For me, there were two. One is JavaScript, I never learned it. And the other is all of the complexity that got added to CSS. I used to love CSS when I just opened a text editor and started writing it.

Devin Egger:
Oh yeah.

Topher DeRosia:
But I looked away one day and when I looked back, there was Grunt and Gulp and Node and NPM and NVM and-

Devin Egger:
Oh yeah.

Topher DeRosia:
… Any number of other things that I had never heard of and tons of documentation on how to do it on a Mac and I was on Linux. And they’re like, “Oh, just run this command and it’ll just go.” And I’m like, “It’s not just going.”

Devin Egger:
Right. Can I just have my text editor back now, please?

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah. And because of that, I walked away from something I loved. I’m not a CSS editor or developer anymore, and that’s just not in my life anymore. And I moved on to something else I loved. So it’s not like my life’s over because I don’t do CSS. But if I had chosen to, I could have figured it out. I could have made it work and my career would’ve dramatically changed. But for a long time as a developer, we didn’t have the idea of a full stack developer. You were a PHP dev, or a Ruby dev, or a CSS developer, a front end developer or whatever. And then suddenly companies wanted everyone to know all of it, all the time. And I said, “Whew, no, I’m not doing that.” I’m not going to go back and relearn all those other skills and I chose another path. But you don’t have to choose another path. You can dive in and learn it. And if you keep up with stuff, don’t let it get ahead of you like I did, then you’re a lot better off.

Devin Egger:
Yeah. And you can do it. And that’s the thing is, intimidating things are only intimidating and they’re only confusing because you don’t know it at first. But if you take baby steps and you keep incrementally trying to learn it, all of a sudden that stuff is a lot easier. I mean, when I first started using GitHub and using version control in my process, that was very confusing at first. And using Git is confusing. But what would I go back to doing websites and doing things without it? Heck no, I would not. Same thing, I had the very same issue with CSS when SAS first came out. And you know, you had to compile your CSS and use all these extra things. And I would-

Topher DeRosia:
Do you use SAS or do you use SCSS or less?

Devin Egger:
And what’s the difference in all? Exactly. And all that stuff seems so confusing at first.

Devin Egger:
And it may be, but as someone who did the same thing for a while and said, I don’t want to learn all this stuff. I really like CSS now. I don’t know if I could write CSS without it, I love it. And so same thing just recently, one of the things that, and this goes outside of the WordPress idea, but I think this is all stuff that’s applicable everywhere, is I’m starting to work with Laravel and is to build applications with PHP. And that was something that I wanted to start getting into probably four or five years ago. And I’ll be honest with you, I’ll be completely honest, I got to the first step of install composer, “Nope, I’m out.”

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah.

Devin Egger:
I literally, I saw that and I go, “I don’t know how to do this.” And I walked away and come back to it five years later. And man, that was a very easy step. If I would’ve just done the thing that it’s said to do and just trudge along with the stuff that I didn’t really understand at the point, I would be a little bit further ahead than I am right now. And that’s not to say… And here’s a good one to insert here, 4.5, number 4.5 on the list is comparing your level to someone else’s level.

Devin Egger:
And we got to remember, as a beginner WordPress developer, as a junior WordPress, as a senior WordPress developer, whatever, your level is your level, and there is no better level or further along. You are where you are in your development and it’s good to have goals and it’s good to have people that you look up to in the space, but try not to compare yourself and to remember that as long as you’re having fun and enjoying what you’re doing, that’s the real point of what we’re trying to do. And you can do a lot of harm. You can do a lot of self-harm by beating yourself up for not being, “Oh, I’m not as good as this guy I watch on YouTube or on Twitch or whatever.”

Devin Egger:
There’s a lot of that. And it doesn’t do you any good.

Topher DeRosia:
Nope.

Devin Egger:
You are where you are.

Topher DeRosia:
You are where you are. You and I were talking before we started recording about my comparisons, comparing myself with other people in the past. And I was a short timer at a job one time. I just didn’t last very long, just a few months. And at the time I told myself and that I told other people that it was because I wasn’t good enough. And recently I have realized that it wasn’t a matter of good or bad, it was a matter of knowledge set. I didn’t have the knowledge that they needed me to have or that they needed the person in that role to have. And so it didn’t make me a better or worse developer that I didn’t have that. I just didn’t have it. And it’s not about good and bad.

Devin Egger:
There was a role there and that role had a specific domain, if you will. Not having the skill sets for that domain does not mean that you’re not a good developer or that you shouldn’t be in the WordPress space. And that kind of leads us on to our final point is that, and this has carry over into a lot of other industries, but if you end up not liking coding, if you end up finding out that you actually aren’t a developer, there’s still space for you in WordPress. There are so many opportunities for you to have a gainful and enjoyable career with WordPress without writing code. You can do it. You can be project manager, you can be a content developer, you can be an advocate. There’s a ton of… I mean Topher, like you said before, every company needs accountants.

Topher DeRosia:
That’s right.

Devin Egger:
There is space for you in the WordPress world.

Topher DeRosia:
There are HR departments, there are content writers, there’s everything. If there’s a job for it, there’s probably a WordPress company that needs it.

Devin Egger:
Exactly. And WordPress is a great community to be a part of. And it’s a very active community and it’s, I think a very supportive community. We have a ton of support on our team and through our channels. And I love being a WordPress developer, but at some point it’s nice for me to know that at some point in time I decide, this new thing that they just introduced, I actually, I really don’t want to do that one anymore. I’m over it. Y’all can have the new stuff. There’s still space for whoever wants to be a part of it, there’s space for you at the WordPress table.

Topher DeRosia:
And I’m a good example of that. I called myself a developer for 25 years before saying, “Yeah, maybe I’m better at this other thing. Maybe I want to do that over there and get out of it.” And we talked about earlier, not being intimidated by my new stuff or whatever. And one of the reasons I didn’t dive into CSS, I just figured it out, is because there were other things that I enjoyed and was good at and I didn’t need to learn CSS. I could just go have a good happy life without it. And that was my choice. So if you are not into development, don’t feel stuck.

Devin Egger:
And again, remember as long as you’re happy and you enjoy what you’re doing, that is what’s most important. Not the title and not the title that you’re put with. As a quick recap, let’s go back through it. The five, four and a half, five, six and a half things that we decided that as-

Topher DeRosia:
Shorting your number of things.

Devin Egger:
… Be good at WordPress, developers should remember is, pay attention to the new stuff as it comes in. Watch it, be aware of it, but don’t forget about the old stuff. It’s not going away and it’s still useful. Next one is someone has already figured it out. Just sitting there bashing your head against the desk, trying to figure out something and it’s not working and you just can’t get it, try Google, man and dig through page 10 and see what’s out there. Someone has figured it out. But don’t be afraid. If you can’t find it, write it yourself and be the first person that comes up with that shiny new function.

Topher DeRosia:
And then go to bed.

Devin Egger:
And then go to bed, or take a shower, or play golf, or fish. But separate yourself from the problem and don’t try to get it all in one shot. If it’s not working, separate yourself from it and let your unconscious do the work. And you’d be amazed at how quickly you can come up with a solution when you just kind of let go of it. Next one was don’t be afraid to jump into the new things and don’t be intimidated by them. And there’s all sorts of new stuff that, that’s one of the most challenging things. And what I think is one of the most awesome things about this career path is that the world of web development is constantly changing and it will not stop changing. And so that’s just a part of the gig and trying to be intimidated by this stuff.

Devin Egger:
And at the same time, while you’re watching people make these things and do these new things, don’t just compare yourself to the next person that is a faster typer or can remember the functions better or anything like that. You are where you are. And that’s again, as long as you’re happy with where you’re at, that’s the point. And then the final bit is, as someone that’s in WordPress and two people that have been in the WordPress ecosystem for quite a while, even if you find out someday that you don’t want to be a developer anymore or that coding isn’t your thing anymore, that doesn’t mean that you’re out of the WordPress ecosystem. There’s always a place for you here.

Topher DeRosia:
Yeah, always.

Devin Egger:
Cool. Well, I think that about wraps it up. What other closing thoughts do you have on us? What sage words of wisdom can you share?

Topher DeRosia:
The WordPress ecosystem is a big place. And in the world of technology, it’s probably one of the nicest places as far as people, community. It has its warts. You’ll see people fighting, you’ll see some horrible people say horrible things. But you’ll see less of it in WordPress than in most other places.

Devin Egger:
Agreed.

Topher DeRosia:
So give it a chance.

Devin Egger:
Stick with it there, young developer.

Topher DeRosia:
That’s right. You can do it.

Devin Egger:
All right. Well, for all of us here at Master WP, this is Devin

Topher DeRosia:
And I’m Topher.

Devin Egger:
And we’re signing off. Thanks guys.

Monet Davenport:
Thank you for listening to this episode. Press The Issue is a production of Master WP, produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue. To find more episodes, subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com.

Your expertise makes you money doing what you do. Now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash visit learndash.com.