Aug 5Respected Elsewhere: The Prophet’s Paradox in Professional LifeA prophet is not revered in his own country, according to the Bible. After years of working in the IT department of the City of Chattanooga, I had moments like that. I “grew up” professionally there, so it felt like my home country—the place where I was raised. I’m sure…Professional Development3 min readProfessional Development3 min read
Jul 6Member-onlyTrue Will | EsoteknixI remember a discussion from a few years ago with a Christian friend. Because I have studied and drawn upon Buddhism, Taoism, modern paganism, etc., he said that I was “picking and choosing.” Albeit perhaps from a different perspective, I understand how cherry picking can be a negative thing among…Wisdom5 min readWisdom5 min read
Jun 13Member-onlyCome on in… sit a spell. | EsoteknixThe history of the English word “spell” is long and interesting. It has two main uses in modern English. As a verb, it means “to name or write the letters of a word in order,” and as a noun, it means “a charm or incantation.” …Magic4 min readMagic4 min read
May 11Member-onlyKenn’s 21 Rules for Software Development | EsoteknixAs someone who’s been an information technology professional for over three decades, I’ve learned a few things along the way. …Programming6 min readProgramming6 min read
Dec 2, 2021How to use Monolog with a custom WordPress pluginMonolog is a PHP library that’s widely used for logging. We develop a lot of custom plugins at Webinology, and a while back we decided that we wanted to use Monolog in our WordPress Plugin Boilerplate-based plugins. WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is class-centric and we wanted to devise a way to…WordPress5 min readWordPress5 min read
Nov 5, 2021How to Handle Plugin Dependency in WordPressHave you ever written plugin code in WordPress that was dependent on another plugin to run? If your code tries to execute before the plugin you require has loaded, obviously, it won’t work. There are plugins available to modify the load order of plugins, but that really isn’t necessary. …WordPress3 min readWordPress3 min read
Jun 10, 2021Making good software isn’t easy (or quick)I spent a large swath of my IT career with one organization. When I joined them, it was as a programmer, predominantly using COBOL and IBM CICS to provide instructions for mainframes that were the size of a ’67 VW Bus. Over time, this organization decided that we would pull…Development4 min readDevelopment4 min read
