Every year, like most everyone I am sure, I make broad claims about what I’m going to learn, develop and do this year. Ironically, this blog is one of them. With that said, I did a lot of reading and decided that making a Personal Development document was a great step forward in actually accomplishing these goals. One interesting article talked about a “T” shape developer skill set.
The “T”
The top part of the “T” is the broadest, deepest knowledge base. For me, that’s obvious: PHP. PHP is the language that powers WordPress and just so happens to be the language I decided to learn 15 years ago. More importantly, my job is based around my knowledge of WordPress and thus, PHP. Therefore, the top of my “T” should be PHP. Interestingly, the WordPress codebase (and how I learned to structure my code), is a bit out of date. Things like Namespaces, Unit tests and Continuous Integration (CI) have become critical to PHP development, but not necessarily to WordPress development itself. Thus, the top of my “T” has been established.
The idea behind the bottom part of the “T” is the tougher part for me. There are other languages, applications and tools that are gaining ground in the web world. However, if I tried to do all of them, I would ultimately fail. This has been my biggest issue in the past. I decide that something is cool, learn the basics, build something small and then forget about it.
The Top
To fix this, I decided to create a massive Google doc with everything I could think of learning or leveraging this year. This included everything from PHP to React, APIs, etc. Pretty much a massive brain dump. I then categorized it into languages/skills. For instance CI and documentation fall under multiple languages, but is a necessary skill for me to learn this year. As I mentioned, anything that fell under PHP or useful to my day job got bumped to the top of the list.
After writing everything down, the next category that I felt was important was WordPress. While I am a full fledged PHP/MySQL developer, WordPress is my bread and butter. They have integrated Gutenberg, and thus React, into WordPress core. React is an emerging (more like already emerged) technology that leverages JavaScript to make things super awesome. I am well versed in JavaScript, but React is a whole new animal.
Because of its importance to WordPress, and web development as a whole, that’s my number one priority. As I previously mentioned, React is one of those things that I have “learned” multiple times. As with everything else on my list, I’ve decided that a personal project leveraging React is the best way to learn and retain these skills.
Beyond React, I’ve identified a few other WordPress related skills and projects that I think are important to learn in more detail to develop part of my “T”. Some of these include integrating React and Gutenberg into existing plugins and themes. I am also hopeful to formalize my plugin and theme development. There’s no intention to turn it into a side business, but I have some cool ideas to help get my work out there in a more commercial setting.
The Bottom
APIs are all the rage nowadays, so I also added that to my final list. WordPress itself has a REST API. So learning the ins and outs of that is critical. Further down my “T” APIs are an integral part of my learning. I’ve built a mini API for Amazon Web Services (AWS) already. There’s also a big project in development leveraging a third-party API. Not to mention my personal React project, which will leverage a custom API.
There are three other little things that I think will help both professionally and personally. The first is roadmap development. I think creating a roadmap for plugins I write is a great way to keep me on track and prevent me from diving down passion based rabbit holes. I’m combining that with better documentation, so that other users of my plugins can have better insight into what they actually do. Finally, webhooks are on my list. They’re a cool little feature that a lot of emerging websites and technologies are using and I have a few existing use cases that leverage them.
Now that I have written this post, I feel like maybe the list is still too long. Luckily the Google Doc I created is always flexible and never set in stone. I really think the aforementioned code, skills, etc. for better Personal Development will create an incredibly solid “T”. Believe it or not, when I started thinking about this post and creating the doc, my list was three times as long.
It’s going to be a fun 2021 on so many levels. With a document (and this post) to guide me and keep me accountable, I’m very excited where my Personal Development is headed.
Stay tuned to this blog and check out my socials to follow along.