New Year's resolution

I don't usually do New Year's resolutions, I figure that if you want to achieve something then you should set that goal straight away, rather than arbitrarily doing it once a year.  However, it's been almost 6 months since I put up a new blog post, and that's just not acceptable!

So, my New Year's resolution is... to update this blog at least once a week.  

I've been busy in the last 6 months, very busy!  Here are a few highlights...

I've created a new website for the lovely Emma Malik - world renowned comedian.  This was a really interesting project, working on someone else's personal site, to their requirements, but putting into practise the security and performance tricks I'd learnt working on my own site, and my many years of professional experience.

I've been freelancing in my spare time on PeoplePerHour.  This has been great fun, as I love taking on new projects and solving problems, and some of the projects have already pushed me outside of my comfort zone - I love learning new things!

I've been getting into Wordpress development a lot, largely as part of the freelancing.  As an application, it's come a long way from when I'd previously looked at it, many years ago.  I'm liking it a lot, and may look at migrating this blog over, when I get more time to think through the logistics of it.

I've been working on and published my first course on Skillshare.  This is entitled Optimising your website: A development workflow with Git and Gulp, and it's based on the series of blog posts that I started to write, about my New development process with Git and Gulp and First Gulp task - concatenation.  It goes through many more steps through the process that I've built, but also, doesn't include everything.  I will be looking to create more courses to go into further detail with optimisation, and also a security-focused workflow course.  I plan to retroactively blog about each part as well, so look out for those posts over the next few weeks.  Should help me keep my resolution for January at least!

Looking forward to a productive and eventful 2018!  I hope you are too.

New development process with Git and Gulp

Whilst working on my new project, Privacy Tools, I decided that I really needed to sort out my development process.  Not that there was anything particularly wrong with it, it's just very old school and manual.

I literally write every line of code (HTML, PHP, CSS and Javascript) by hand, in Notepad++.  This doesn't even syntax highlight particularly well, let alone auto-complete.  And then the build process is also manual, going to websites like Closure Compiler to minify my javascript.  Rather labourious, especially for someone who doesn't get much time to code these days, and therefore needs every minute to go into writing code!

So I started by finally using Git!  I don't think anyone in the development community could have possibly not heard of Git, even if they haven't used it.  I'd played about with it, done some tutorials (courtesy of LinkedIn Learning), but never used it properly.  I figured now was the time, and I'm genuinely loving it.  It's great to know that everything is properly stored away, and I can easily track changes and get back to earlier versions of a file (or set of files) when needed.  It's also stopping me from wandering off and starting a new bit whilst I'm still in the middle of another, as this really confuses the commits - now I'm working on one distinct chunk, getting that working, committing it with a lovely comment, and then on to the next one.  Lovely!

However, that doesn't really improve my workflow or efficiency (unless I need to revert back to an earlier file version).  Where I've really had fun is with Gulp.  Gulp is...

a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

And it really does do that!  I did have a look at some others, such as the increasingly popular Webpack, but what I really like about Gulp is that the automation is written in javsacript, so can be completely customisable.  You can easily minify javascript files and stylesheets, concatenate files, and pretty much any else that you can think of.  

I'm not going to go into too much detail on this post, but my next one will show you the details of my first Gulp file.  I've already started adding more and more as I've gone along, so I'm sure there'll be many more posts to follow.