After an exciting year of learning new tools and creating new processes, it’s time to look ahead to next year. Read my review of 2015 here: Year In Review – 2015: Version Control, Starter Themes, Blogging and More. So far I’ve got 10 New Year’s resolutions plugged into my Trello board, ranging from personal to professional. What are your New Year’s resolutions?
Learning New Technologies To Improve My Workflow
One thing’s for certain, keeping my workflow modern and adapting to new technologies has given a huge boost to both profitability and efficiency at GetPhound. One tool in particular I have been putting off learning for far too long is Sass, a stylesheet language that keeps code maintainable and organized.
CSS is a basic web language that although powerful, lacks certain programming functionality to keep it easily maintainable and DRY. DRY means Don’t Repeat Yourself, a common principle that most developers strive to uphold in their coding standards.
Sass allows you to create variables for anything you want. An example would be setting values for: primary color, secondary color, primary-font, heading-font, body-font, etc. You are given the freedom to be creative, and adapt the language to your individual needs. Mixins are another awesome feature that are reusable blocks of styles you can use throughout your stylesheet while keeping things tidy and DRY. I won’t dive any further, the power of Sass deserves its own lengthy blog post to explain its intricate, yet intuitive capabilities. Learn more about Sass at their website.
A lot of WordPress developers are utilizing task runners to automate their development process. Task runners can minify stylesheets, compacting thousands of lines of CSS to speed up your website. They can also automatically add vendor prefixes to your CSS3 properties, an otherwise mundane and repetitive process. They can compile your Sass, that way your not juggling multiple command line tools at once. Gulp seems to be the most popular task runner at the time of writing this post, I plan on implementing that into my workflow this year.
Attending Conferences And Meeting New People
Living on the east coast there is never a shortage of WordCamp events to attend. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, all the major cities are hosting these super informative events that bring in WordPress enthusiasts from all over. I plan to take full advantage of my location this year, and attend as many events as I can.
Speaking
I hope to be able to speak at another WordCamp this year. I owe a great deal to WordPress and the community, and I’d like to give back anyway I can, especially by speaking about what I’ve learned.
Building Engagement On Twitter
I doubt I’ll ever be active enough to tweet 20-30 times a day. However, I hope to cut down on social media droughts, where I don’t post for an extended period of time. Twitter’s built-in analytics is extremely in-depth and should keep me on point, highlighting weaknesses in my tweet activity which should allow me to make adjustments, stay active and engaged.
Full Speed Ahead!
Most of this post reiterates on points I touched on in my article: Year In Review – 2015: Version Control, Starter Themes, Blogging and More, so if you haven’t read it yet, check it out.
My primary goal this year is to expand on a lot of ideas and projects that went well for me last year and to add a few weapons to my workflow arsenal along the way.
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