Levelling up your development workflow

with Dara Skolnick in the Developer track

Interactive slideshow on GitHub

“About a year ago I realized that my WordPress development workflow wasn’t nearly as efficient as it could have been, so I took steps to make it far better, and I think that sharing what I learned would be really useful for other developers. Here are some of the things I might talk about:

  • Developing locally using MAMP instead of working on a live or staging server
  • Using version control, even when I’m working by myself on a project. Now every project I create has its own Git repository
  • Using a custom starter theme instead of starting from scratch every time
  • Using Sass instead of plain old CSS
  • Using Gulp (and before that, CodeKit) to run tasks that I had to do manually before (e.g. image compression, CSS/JS concatenation and minification, JS linting, and, of course, live reloading)

This talk would definitely be most useful for people who are already WordPress developers.

I wrote a couple of blog posts on the topic of developing locally, which can give you an idea of some of the things I might talk about:

  1. http://daraskolnick.com/developer-tip-tuesday-always-develop-locally/
  2. http://daraskolnick.com/developer-tip-tuesday-always-develop-locally-part-2/

Learning outcomes

I think what participants would learn is already covered above. In sum, they’d learn to develop more efficiently than they are currently.

Let me know if you have any questions or if I can help clarify anything!