Just Checking In

Blink your eyes in a pandemic and the next thing you know, three months have passed.

I really felt like I was getting in the groove for awhile, too. Last time I checked in, I wrote about how it’s 2021 and we should all really consider using namespaces in WordPress projects by now, and I was planning out my next set of topics for my series about Rethinking PHP devlopment in WordPress (is it a rule that I link to this in every post I write now?).

In fact, that series is still ongoing, and I’ve got a doozy planned for using objects as a data structure instead of arrays, but I’ve been starting and not being terribly good at finishing a few different side projects, and have also gotten a bit sidetracked by participating in the Dev Book Club, where we’ve been reading and discussing the 2nd edition of the great Martin Fowler book, Refactoring. I’ve owned the 1st edition for a long time and admittedly read about half of it, so it’s great going through it again because all of the examples are written in JavaScript instead of Java and it’s just really hitting me a bit better now that I have more developer experience under my belt than when I first tried readin git.

Since you were last here, too, I refreshed the theme on my site, and I’ve been digging into how to develop board games on the Board Game Arena platform, because even though I can see the light at the end of the tunnel in this pandemic and might be able to eventual play games with my friends in person again at some point this year, it’s still cool to learn new things and I’m hopeful that we’ll all continue to play games online in the meantime, too.

All of which is to say, I just wanted to write a little bit to say hey, encourage you to check out Gravity Forms 2.5 that finally released last week, and let you know that it’s finally springtime in Minnesota. I pumped air in my bike tires and took the briefest of rides a couple of weeks ago, and let me tell you: sheltering in place for like 15 months has really put a damper on my fitness. I’m looking forward to setting some new goals, getting out a little bit more this year, working on some fun developer tools, absorbing as much knowledge as I can about my craft, learning more about the world, giving back to my community, and figuring out just how to be as “normal” as possible again in the coming weeks and months.

In the meantime, hey! I hope you’ve been well.