I wrote my first WordPress plugin yesterday as a bit of a diversion. There was something I wanted to do to enhance this website, and I discovered that nobody had implemented a good solution yet (which shocked me a bit) so I set to playing around and wrote a plugin in PHP.
I’m afraid I can’t tell you what plug-in it is, or what it even does, because I posted it on my REAL blog (ie. the face I’m showing to potential employers, not my nom de plume blog here, and I even packaged and registered it with one of the WordPress plugin directories, so if I told you what it was I would risk my anonymity. (I’ll give you a hint, though: you can see its effects on this very web page!)
For as insanely-simple as this plug-in was, I went sort of overboard and implemented i18n internationalization. (Read: if you code something properly, it can be easily modified to function in other [human spoken] languages.) So if someone used my plug-in for their WordPress template design and happened to have a website running in French, Spanish or Russian, the plugin would automatically alter its output for those languages.
I’m sure you, the reader, could hardly care less. But I’ve always been fascinated with languages, and I’ve always wanted to know how to do proper software development for multi-language support. So I was slightly jazzed when I altered the language of my main blog (for a minute) and saw the plugin output change as well.
Speaking of multiple languages, this is also a demonstration of one of my few forays into PHP. So I guess I can put PHP on my resume now, huh?
It’s been so funny and frustrating at the same time: in my ongoing career search, recruiters and potential employers get so hung-up on what languages I know and how long I’ve known them. Until recently I couldn’t claim any C# experience, and then just last month, over the span of two weeks I’ve designed a serious C# class library that uses heavy class reflection and integrates over the COM bridge with Excel. When will employers get it through their thick skulls that I can learn a language in a week. “Oh no, we can’t hire this guy. He doesn’t know C# yet!” Bozos!
I had a recruiter recently think she couldn’t submit to me a management job because I didn’t have 10 years Java experience. I tried to explain to her that Java had been barely used, that no development tools (not even the first Visual Cafe my Symantec) existed, the Java 1.1 JVM hadn’t even been released and maybe a handful of experimental web applets were in existence. Really, nobody was using Java yet because it was unproven and nobody even knew what to do with it yet. And yet somehow it was important that back then I was professionally working with it?
And what’s more, this was important for a person in a management position? Ugh!
Whoops, sorry there. I didn’t mean for this to be a rant against recruiters. It was supposed to be an upbeat mention about how fun it is to be a hacker. And seriously, I know this makes me a big-ass geek, but writing that plugin—that’s one of the happiest ways I could have spent a Sunday afternoon. Yes. I am a geek.