I started yo-yoing approximately one week before the original draft of this post. During that time I learned a lot of introductory information from different sources. This is the blog post I wish I had when I started yo-yoing.
Recommendations
Always Bring Your Pull Requests Up to Date
A Pull Request (PR) should always be up to date with the branch into which it is being merged. Another way of saying this is you should be able to merge your PR as a fast-forward merge (even if you decide not to do a fast-forward merge). In this post we’ll look at how a safe looking PR that is out of date can be catastrophic to merge.
Intermediate Git
I’ve been using Git for a number of years. When I was a Git beginner, I followed some prescribed steps and things worked – most of the time. This seems to be a pretty common experience for people starting out with Git. The magical part is when I started to understand Git, when I went from beginner to intermediate. These are some blog posts and videos that would have helped me with that transition.
WordPress Hooks and PHP Namespaces
While PHP namespaces allow you to refer to a function in file without using the fully qualified name, there is a catch when adding a WordPress hook or filter. The PHP __NAMESPACE__ magic constant can be helpful in this situation.
phpunit.xml vs phpunit.xml.dist
As a PHP programmer I’ve seen projects with a phpunit.xml file or a phpunit.xml.dist file (or even both, which is a mistake). These are configuration files for PHPUnit but why the two different file names? PHPUnit first tries to use phpunit.xml and if that file does not exist, then it tries to use phpunit.xml.dist instead. PHPUnit only uses one of these files, never both.
JavaScript Or (||) Versus Nullish Coalescing Operator (??)
The “or” (||) operator and the “nullish coalescing operator” (??) can often be used in similar ways when reading a property from an object that may or may not exist. When dealing with strings you’re typically better off using “or” (||) and for numbers you’re typically better off using the “nullish coalescing operator” (??).
SemVer TLDR
Semantic versioning (SemVer) is a standard for defining the version numbers. A version number consists of three numbers separated by periods (X.Y.Z). The type of change being introduced (e.g. a new feature or a change that breaks backwards compatibility) determines which numbers are incremented.
Writing Posts with CLI Commands
A lot of the posts I write include command-line interface (CLI) commands to type in. I’ve found over time there are things I can do to improve how these commands are communicated.
Should I add .env to .gitignore?
The short answer is, “yes”. You should use your .gitignore file to ignore the .env file.
.gitignore Hidden Files with Exceptions
In most operating systems by default, files that start with a period (.) are hidden. When setting up my .gitignore file, I like to ignore all these hidden files (with a few exceptions).