How many hours this week have you spent becoming someone you’d like to be?
Me? I’ve spent about 5 hours this week becoming a more proficient web developer.
Now, I had to cram my other responsibilities in there, to be sure. But I intentionally set aside time to code, test, cuss at broken code, and recode some code for which there is no immediate payoff. Nobody is paying me to write this code. In the end, this particular code is functionally not very consequential. It isn’t fancy, or anything others haven’t done before. It’s just a simple, incremental change to my smart little WordPress plugin.
It probably won’t even ever be released, because I’ve learned while making it that I don’t really like it.
That’s right. I spent 5 hours this week doing something that I am probably not going to use.
But in the larger scheme of things, this code is foundational. It’s helping me to learn something that I didn’t know last week. In particular, I learned about the $wp_filesystem method of safely and securely saving files within a WordPress plugin or theme. (I know, stop the presses… thrilling stuff.)
But more than just learning something, this week I consciously became something different, something incrementally better.
That same itch to improve and learn is driving me to attend WordCamp Raleigh this weekend. I can’t wait to meet others in the area who are neck-deep in WordPress development.
Are you a developer attending WordCamp Raleigh? Hit me up, I’d love to meet you!