May 5, 2018 — In my day-to-day work I often need to either convey or understand how something works. When that something is complex in nature domain-specific jargon and acronyms will fail horribly in explaining it. Living in an era where knowledge is power I’m amazed by how poor our tools to share that knowledge are.

Here I will present you a collection of metaphores that helped me and others understand, or explain, how complex stuff works in the context of WordPress and development. I will also share some “gotchas” about this tool as old as children stories.

April 24, 2018 — Because you can’t always start from scratch.

Modern Tribe took on this impervious task head-on.

In this speech I share the knowledge the team working on “The Events Calendar” plugin suite collected along the way, the practicalities, the “gotchas””, the pitfalls in human and development terms.
I will also go into the details of down-to-earth examples, findings and tools we used to do it.

Presentation Slides »

January 24, 2018 — The ex-dev, the revolving door and the poet: why communication fails in development and what we can do about

If there is a chant that runs through the tech community, that unites us all in agreement, that is: communication is the key. Submerged by social networks, 54 different chat systems, code review comments and SomethingDrive documents the quantity of communication is often valued more than its quality and we find ourselves thinking we have so much communication we should not have any of the problems we have. I will try to highlight the reasons behind such failures in communication focusing on how those affect teams of 1 to many developers and propose some practical and immediate solutions to the issues.

April 13, 2017 — If “WordPress is not testable” then why bother about testable code at all?

Because writing testable code is the first step to testing your code, testing your code is the first step to testing ALL your code, testing all your code is the first step to reduce shipping times, reducing shipping times is the first step to fast response to feature requests and bugs that makes clients happy.

And because the first sentence is less true every day.

Let’s find a definition of “testable code” that applies to both WordPress and the current practices of testing; let’s see how we can stop ignoring the elephant in the room and embrace testing with a sane approach that improves code and coders quality without leaving anyone out in the cold.

I will present real-world examples of new and existing code, the tools used to write and maintain testable code and some simple rule-of-thumbs to keep in mind when developing for our beloved CMS.

July 4, 2016 — Words like “unit testing,” “acceptance testing” and “test-driven development” are slowly becoming part of the WordPress development landscape. Let’s understand some of those buzz-words building a catapult.

April 5, 2016 — Too often the idea of WordPress as an old and bloated framework and its PHP 5.2 back-compatibility minimum requirement will hide implementation mistakes and a “spaghetti” code approach.
Let’s take responsibility for our code and stop writing it the “old way.”
I will talk about test-driven development, dependency-injection, template engines and other techniques and tools that will allow for modern and efficient code while maintaining PHP 5.2 compatibility.

Presentation Slides »

November 24, 2015 — Intervista fatta a Luca Tumedei al primo «WordPress Contributor Day» italiano, organizzato dalla «Italia WP Community» a Milano il 7 novembre del 2015. #wpcdit

November 13, 2015 — Sviluppo guidato dai test in ambiente WordPress. La prima parte della frase fa aggrottare la fronte in condizioni normali: in ambiente WordPress assume un che di mistico ed irraggiungibile. Non è così.

Presentation Slides »

November 8, 2015 — Impareremo insieme cosa sono e come gestire i filtri e le azioni di WordPress, parte teorica e dimostrazione con un plugin creato ad hoc per la serata.

Dimostrazione di funzionamento di azioni e filtri all’interno del plugin demo è possibile trovare tutti i riferimenti al codex di WordPress: http://bit.ly/1XZ71OC

Presentation Slides »