Yesterday marked my last day with Code Cabin after nearly four years as the Lead Developer on their flagship software suite, WP Google Maps.
I’ll be writing a short blog post about the plugin, specifically what work I’ve done with it, in the near future.
My proudest achievement here was taking a monolithic, purely procedural application with heavy use on global scope and little in terms of standardisation, and turning that into an almost fully modular, DRY, and compartmentalised design.
I wish I could have finished this, however for an application with quite a large code base and a user base of almost 500,000, this has to be done very, very carefully and very much in a piecemeal approach.
Refactoring and working with “legacy” code is something I’ve done a great deal of, as well as application architecture, both of which gave me the vision to turn this plugin into something with huge potential for being built upon.
I’m keen to get into something new, however due to COVID-19, I’m finding there is still a bit of reluctance for hiring and investment from employers at the moment. I’m also interested to see how the pandemic will affect the popularity of remote work, as I’m keen to travel and earn at the same time rather than being tied down to an office. That was actually my plan for this year, but obviously that hasn’t happened.
With that in mind, I’ll be taking a couple of months off to train myself in Laravel, Symfony and JavaScript frameworks. I have a WordPress REST cache plugin to use as a practical application of these frameworks. I never really had any intention of being a WordPress developer, I’m keen to move into Laravel and Symfony now that those frameworks have fully matured, however WordPress is so widely used that I think my caching plugin concept would be a great way to learn Laravel whilst actually producing a useful application.
I’ll be freelancing during this time, so if you’re looking for any engineering, then please do get in touch!