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2017-01-13
Tags: #investing
Thoughts on Persona of K. Adam White WordPress Web Development Talk Video Entitled "Pay No Attention to That WordPress Behind Your Application"
By w̶i̶e̶l̶d̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶.̶c̶o̶m̶ author Morgan Jassen
I encountered the persona of K.Adam White, and started occasionally trying to follow what they've been up to -- to follow their publishings.
I saw the blog post "Pay No Attention to That WordPress Behind Your Application" ( http://www.kadamwhite.com/...behind-your-application ) on kadamwhite.com. Inside the blog post is embedded a video called "Pay no attention to that WordPress behind your application - K. Adam White. A Day of REST". I watched the video.
For me a big take away from having watched this video, was that web development can be a process of learning-as-one-goes. It can be a process of mashing up many different technologies as "components" to make a larger, integrated application. In other words, even working on large high-profile projects, if the project requires custom functionality, then it requires some degree of what might on a smaller scale be referred to as hacking-together-a-solution.
In the speech in the video, the speaker K. Adam mentions that even after integrating a custom application with WordPress, there were some loose ends in the WordPress Admin that needed manual customization to redirect link functionality.
Another part I enjoyed in the video was the part when K.Adam's persona says one time they built a WordPress-based web application but ran into performance issues, so instead scrapped it and totally re-built the site as a static page generator written in Ruby to make it live and working. That is, before finally going back afterwards again and making it work in WordPress. I find this story inspiring because of the degree of realism therein -- the situation where an attempt runs into a problem and a workaround is made to meet a deadline, before finally going back and putting something more permanent / better in place.
This is both terrifying and inspiring to me. I'm thankful that K.Adam's persona shared these perspectives on their blog. As a web developer it comforts me to learn that, while other web developers are doing more complex things than I've done, and are using new technologies, they are still using techniques that I can relate to.
[2019-03-11 edit: Moved to: https://i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶o̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2017/... .html.]