 All right, folks, thanks for being here. Before we get rolling, I want to emphasize that this is the condensed June 2018 edition of this super fast life hacks talk, just a series of tips. And this is as short as I could possibly make it. Why are you sitting here? Well, you obviously are sitting here in this room because you want to be more like me. It's very obvious what other reason would you have for choosing this particular session. You want to be productive. You want to be talented. Like this guy who's sitting up in front of you right now, you want to be as cool as the guy who won Best Actor for his portrayal of Gandalf the Grey of the 2010 Mour movie awards. Very proud moment. Anyway, that's why you're here. So I'm going to share with you some tips so you can learn to be more like this guy. So let's get started as quick as possible. Tip number one, I like a site called diffcheckered.com. It's pretty cool for pasting two different snippets of text and comparing the differences. Really handy, highlighting those differences between maybe a snippet of code. Maybe you think it's been modified. Maybe it's just that email that you sent to a co-worker to ask for their review, and they've changed something. You want to know what it was. Git is something that every developer should be using. It's a no-brainer. This is something that I resisted for a long time, thought, eh, that sounds too hard. I can just save a bunch of copies of my code on my computer. But Git, it just makes you a better person all around. Changes your outlook on life. It's not really optional, people. If you're writing code, you have to be using Git. So let's move on to local development, which also is not optional. This is something that is super easy. And I don't know why I took so long to start using this. But it's super simple and completely essential. There are free programs like desktop server and local by Flywheel, which you can download, and they can run. They can allow you to run a local instance of WordPress on your machine. So you have a website, a WordPress site on your computer that is only accessible there and not on the internet. It's going to allow you to eliminate that responsible practice of ever testing anything on a live site that's on the internet. PHPStorm is my IDE of choice. This is where I write any code that I ever need to write. It's a super, super sweet program. I think it's made me a better developer. It's got everything that I need built into it, including a terminal and a Git UI, and a lot of awesome, really fun code hinting. It kind of nudges me in the right direction and auto formatting and stuff. Who else uses PHPStorm in their room? A few people. Yeah, you guys know how cool it is, right? I'm not going to be one of those crazy people who tells you that you can just live your life without social media and stuff, but it's here to stay for better or worse. Social media is entrenched in our lives, but we know it can be a time suck, so what do we do? Well, what I do is accept that it's a part of my life, but also take deliberate steps to make it more inconvenient for me to use. And the end result is I end up using it only when it's truly necessary in my life. And a good example is just never installing social media apps on any device. I'm forced then to use the browser to navigate for any social media purposes, and that means it's a little bit more tedious and cumbersome, and I never go waste any time there. I only visit social media sites when there's a legitimate purpose for doing so. Just a little life hack there. What do you think about that? Throughout my career, I've learned that there are a lot of different things that I can invest in monetarily with my time and energies, whether it be education and relationships and skill building and so forth. Reputation is one of the most powerful life come to appreciate. There's a lot of stories that I could share to illustrate this point. It might be a talk in its own, but what I think reputation does is it allows you to later on walk through doors that today you don't even know you're gonna wanna walk through. Late in my days of consulting, I encountered a client, and we're all competing against other providers, the brother's, nephew's, sister's, girlfriend's, cousin who will build a website for cheaper, and I encountered a client who said, Kyle, you don't need to worry about this one. You're not competing against anyone. We're not considering anybody. We feel like we're lucky to get to work with you. That was like an earth-shattering moment for me. It's like, how did this happen? Like, these guys knew who I was before I was ever contacted by them, and if I was willing to work with them, then it was a done deal. And that was because they'd heard of me, and my reputation preceded me. Typing out passwords is stupid and waste of time, so I downloaded the Unlock app, and every time I am unauthenticating on my machine, I just tap my iPhone and I'm in. Pretty simple. I want everybody to put their hands up in the air. All right, we're gonna do this together. I'm serious, I'm not joking here. I'm not joking. Repeat after me. I do solemnly swear. I do solemnly swear. Thank you. The next website that I build... Will Not Feature a Homepage Slider. Will Not Feature a Homepage Slider. Thank you. Thank you. We're all on the same page here. We are now a part of the coalition against sliders on homepages that cache acronym really works. But this is just a stupid trend that we're done with. The internet is just done with this trend that got way out of hand. Like, it had more than its day. Sliders got more than they ever deserved on the internet. And we need to work together to purge the internet of this atrocity and leave it to the dustbins of the internet history. In a few years, once we're successfully through this time, we'll be able to look back and chuckle a little bit and say, you remember the time back in 2014 when it was kind of cool to have a homepage slider? Yeah, that was crazy. But thank goodness for past it. Well, right now we're not past it. We still have work to do to rid the internet of this terrible trend that went on for far too long. So we're gonna work together. I had your word, you solemnly swore. No more homepage sliders. It's now in the past. All right, and I feel dumb even talking about it. So we're gonna move on. No more sliders in this conversation. Sit, stand desk. You gotta have one of these these days. It's the only way to go. I have a little motorized one in my office. Go up and down several times a day. This is just how you gotta work these days. It's essential. I didn't have one. I'd drop everything I was doing and go get one because I can't work without it. Kinda like my portrait-oriented monitor which I think is a no-brainer. I love this. I don't know about you guys, but I spend a lot of my workdays working on things called web pages and a lot of those actually happen to be oriented portrait style. So a portrait-oriented monitor really works quite well for viewing a lot of information at the same time without scrolling, you get the idea. Landscape monitors makes no sense to me. In retrospect, this emoji can be taken in a couple of different ways. I mean, fire bad customers don't burn them. I think that firing bad customers and clients is a practice that most of us are too reluctant to take advantage of. There are probably a lot of us here in this room who have customers and clients that we should have fired weeks ago. You know it's true. You do. But this is something that we take very seriously if there's any client or customer who is negatively affecting our life, our job satisfaction and our fulfillment and making us go home frustrated at the end of the day. You know what? Life's too short to work with bad clients and customers. We need to get used to taking that leap of faith and just cutting ties. Even if they're paying us money, if they're making us miserable, just trust that there's another client out there that's better. Move on with your life and while you're at it, master all the keyboard shortcuts on your computer. You know what? This is worth the time to just commit those stupid things to memory. Somebody who points and clicks their way through life with a mouse will never be able to keep up with someone who knows their keyboard shortcuts. So just learn them. It's well worth it. I love listening to podcasts all the time. There's something special about audio as a medium for transferring information. Unlike other channels like live lectures or video or text, audio can be consumed passively. So I have the ability to multitask and ride my bike or work out or do dishes and work out around the house. While also taking in information that's super valuable. Other channels require undivided attention. The thing about all of us here is the vast majority of us were self-taught. And what this means, we learned how to code or build websites or whatever it was kind of on our own. We never had formal training. That's true for, I'm sure the overwhelming majority of people in this room. What that means to us is most of us are a little bit self-conscious about what we create. We have this feeling like it kind of works but it's probably not the right way. And what I've learned is that we have to, in order to really grow and get where we want to go and be the professionals that we want to be, we have to learn to swallow our pride and expose the underlying works that we have created. Be willing to pull back the curtain and share it with other people and say, what do you think of this? That's what I encourage you to do. Take advantage of your time here at this word camp. Be willing to swallow your pride, open up your laptop and sit next to a stranger or a friend and just say, hey, this is how I decided to build this. This is the page builder I use or the code that I tried and the plugins that I use. What do you think? How would you have built this? That's what I encourage you to do. Even the most experienced members in this room kind of shudder at that thought. It's a little bit intimidating, but this is how you grow. So I encourage everybody to adopt that practice more often. What can I say about WPCLi that the great Steve Gremel hasn't already said? I'll leave it to him to teach you more, but I think it's a super valuable tool and just like somebody who uses the mouse can never keep up with somebody who knows their keyboard shortcuts. Somebody who points and clicks their way through the WP admin will never be able to keep up with somebody who knows their WPCLi commands. You'll learn them. User switching is a very popular and well-deserved free plugin on WordPress.org repository that allows you to, with a single click, emulate the WordPress experience as another user. Super handy for troubleshooting and understanding the experience that other users with different roles on your site have. My wife and I are in the process of moving now and as a result, we're going through our attic and basement and garage and shadow discovering all this stuff and just going, why do we have this? We've never used this and it's very similar to the feeling that I get when I log into the account where all my domains are registered and there's a lot of stuff like this. Why do I have this? That sounded like such a good idea at the time after I had a few drinks at a WordCamp after party and registered this on my phone. I know some people in this room can relate to that, but I am strongly encouraging everyone here to begin adopting the practice of just like letting these things go. A lot of us register too many domains unnecessarily. The rule that I'm putting on you now is you have one year, that's it. Don't you even dare register. Renew that domain if you haven't used it in one year. That's your rule, okay? From this moment on, you get one year and then it's gone. This is true. Developers who write inline documentation go straight to heaven when they die. Inline documentation is this code that's above the function, this gray comment right there and what it does is describes the function below it and what it does and how it works. And that's super, super handy and all of us who are writing any code should be including our dock blocks at the top. That's the way to go and it makes you a better person. You are a better person if you write inline documentation and it's not just for other developers who may by chance be reading your code. It's also programs that actually read this code. There are scripts that will build documentation sites pulled from the inline documentation and there are IDEs like PHP storm that I use. The reason it's able to hint along the way and tell me you're passing this function in the rain, it's actually expecting a string is because it reads the dock blocks and tells me that along the way. So I'm able to develop a lot more intelligently and avoid mistakes because my programs are deciphering this information from the inline docs. A practice that I've, another practice that I've adopted is opening, won't fix issues and then closing them intentionally for record keeping purposes. This is something that I like to do. There's all these occasions where we have a discussion maybe in Slack at a meet up or a meeting and we decide, oh no, that idea, we don't like it, we're not gonna go that direction. And then the next thing you know, six months or a year later a customer comes or a new employee and says, why didn't we do that? And we all say, I think we talked about it but I don't really remember. And so for the purpose of keeping a record of everything, I like the practice of just going to GitHub, opening an issue, labeling, I mean describing in detail the rationale for why we're not taking this direction, labeling it as won't fix, which is a default label that GitHub provides, and then closing the issue. That makes it searchable and in the future anybody who comes along and says I wonder why we decided not to go this direction with our code base, they'll find this issue and the explanation of what the consensus was. Here's a habit that I have worked hard in recent times to break. Heading up a colleague or a friend on Slack, she's giving them a message that says like, hey, when you got a minute, I got a question for you. I want everybody to stop doing that forever. I think that that is actually rude and what you're doing when you say that is I have a question that is so critical and complicated and nuanced that I require your undivided attention for me to even ask the question. And most of the questions that we're asking anybody, that's not the case. So I say let's stop doing that and instead say hey, here's a question for you. Let the recipient of the question respond on their own time with a more intelligent, well thought out reply and probably with less back and forth. So that's a bad habit I've been working to break. Query Monitor is an essential tool in any developer's troubleshooting tool belt. It's a free plugin that tells you everything about the page that you're viewing and it's just like a wealth of information. Queries, hooks, all the functions that are run, all the templates that are being loaded and so forth. Yeah, you can't live without Query Monitor and I'll finish up with a simple way for you to, a parting thought for you to kind of conclude this WordCamp, the thing is there's nothing that I can stand up here and tell you or the other speakers as well that you can't just learn online. All this information is really helpful but the real value that we don't wanna miss is the other people that are here at this WordCamp. So I strongly encourage you to take advantage of that. We can have virtual conferences, we've got the technology for that but the one thing that you can't get through all of those and you can't get online is an opportunity to interact with other people here and get to know them. The people who are going through the same struggles you are, the people who have solved those problems already and the people who are struggling with problems that you have already solved. Those are all the people that are here. This is the one special thing that you can have at this in-person event that you can't get online. Nothing I can tell you is unique to what I've gotta say. Anyway, so I encourage you for the rest of this WordCamp, what remains to take advantage of that, meet some people and enjoy yourself. Somehow I'll probably share my slides with a bunch more tips that I didn't have time for in our time today and most of all, let's be friends and talk later. Thanks, folks. One question. Oh, one question. Oh, okay, cool. I am in the mountains outside of Sacramento, California. Thank you very much. Thanks, John.