Code Poet just released a free eBook called Getting Pricing Right that interviews Mark Jaquith, Remkus de Vries and Shane Pearlman on setting consulting rates and miscellaneous related topics. It’s short and contains a lot of good advice, as well as links to a lot of resources.
Many actions in WordPress will fire multiple times, which can lead to performance drags and undesired/intuitiveness results. Pippin Williamson points out that you can check how many times an action has already run, and modify your code to respond accordingly.
Jeff Atwood wrote a fascinating article on different methods to use to discourage trolling on social websites, including some discussion of their ethical merits. I wasn’t aware of slowbanning and hellbanning before, but I think they’re very clever ideas.
It’s often much more efficient to access DOM properties directly, rather than using jQuery. The downside to that approach is that there are differences between the various browsers, so in some cases it introduces bigger problems than the extra performance overhead.
Michael Botsko has a good writeup on cloning and pushing updates to shared GitHub repositories, as opposed to the traditional method of forking a repository.
Normally any kind of global values that don’t change within a program’s execution should be defined as constants, but text domains within internationalized WordPress plugins are an exception to that rule. Mark Jaquith explains why it’s important to use a string instead.
I’ll be giving a presentation on building Child Themes at the Seattle WordPress Developer’s Meetup tomorrow. You can follow along with the presentation if you plan on attending.
BackPress is a useful project that packages the re-usable code from WordPress into an independent library you can use in non-WordPress projects.
Here’s a great quote from Jeff Atwood’s post on why he decided to step back from Stack Exchange:
I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.