Every week I talk with a WordPress developer who is thinking about quitting their day job and going full time—either as a freelancer or into creating a new product. Every week I walk them through the reasons I suggest they don’t quit their day jobs just yet. If you’re in a similar place, this may be of help to you too. So here are 5 reasons to keep your day job. #1 Scarcity brings focus I’m going to talk a lot about scarcity. So let’s begin with a simple understanding of what it means. Scarcity is all about a restricted […]
Plugin Development: Do Less
In scouring the many WordPress plugins that exist on the web for my work on Tidy Repo, I’ve noticed some trends. Some plugins do very little; I’ve often said that plugins like Quick Page / Post Redirect and Simple Google Maps Shortcode “do just one thing, and do it well.” Others are more robust, offering turn-key solutions for large-scale problems. Think WooCommerce or Buddypress. It’s only very rarely that I come across a plugin that is actually somewhere in the middle of these two categories, and it got me thinking about which approach I prefer. And the more I thought […]
A New Class: Software Developers Turned Writers
There was a great post on Medium the other day that I’ve been mulling over since it was first published and since Medium doesn’t have a commenting system quite yet I thought I’d share my thoughts here instead. The post, titled Editor, Product Manage Thyself, is an fascinating introspection of a developer turned journalist turned editor and one that I have experience with myself, although I have never considered myself a “journalist” in the typical sense. One of Paul Smalera’s arguments is that editors now have to be just as much product managers in today’s digital economy since they must be […]
1 Comment
Join the conversation