February 10, 2022

November 2, 2020 — This workshop is a continuation of the Troubleshooting Basics workshop. It is aimed at a beginner audience and will help participants learn about using logs to troubleshoot WordPress issues.

The continuation of the Troubleshooting Basics workshop is aimed at a beginner audience. The workshop will cover the following topics:

February 28, 2019 — As a developer, access to debugging information is vital to troubleshooting your code or finding where performance bottlenecks are happening. By using the WordPress Debug Bar, and related add-ons, you’ll be able to track errors, SQL queries, access the query, and give get insight into what’s happening under the hood of your WordPress website.

October 23, 2017 — This talk will demonstrate the benefits of using Xdebug to debug PHP, why it beats the pants off of `var_dump()`, and how it has helped, and continues to help me become a better developer. I’ll talk a bit about what Xdebug is, how it works, and a few common scenarios where Xdebug has helped me to solve problems and gain a better understanding of how various tools work together. I’ll be running Xdebug on a Vagrant box and using PHP Storm for my demonstration. I will cover: 1. How to quickly configure a project to use Xdebug 2. How to set break points and step through code execution 3. How to inspect variables 4. How to use the console to evaluate expressions Xdebug isn’t hard to use, and once you’ve used it you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Presentation Slides »

January 7, 2016 — If you’ve written a line of code in any language, you’ve gotten into a state where you don’t necessarily know what the frig is going on. That thing – it’s right there in the template! Or right in that functions.php file, but nothing happens! Or the wrong thing happens! AAAAAAAARGH!

Sure, you can try adding “echo”, “print_r”, “var_dumps” and the like all over the place, but it’s messy, and there is a better way. With a little bit of set up (but not much – seriously), you too can debug like a champ. If you’ve never seen a real debugger before, or if you’ve just dabbled with one, this talk could change your life substantially for the better.