For a long time, many people told me “you should be a teacher”. And, I confess, I actually love the idea of teaching people – but only really if I can teach people who want to learn. Regular teachers have to teach even those who don’t want to learn – and they have my utmost respect because of it (seriously…school teachers: you have so much respect here!).
So I guess my forays into public speaking at meetups and conferences this year have been a stab at some kind of teaching. But I also set up a challenge to myself to produce some screencast tutorial videos back in 2015 (which I gave the cheesy name “Press Ups“), and that was useful both as a resource to share with others, and as an exercise for myself in creating such things.
More recently I have, myself, been learning a LOT from screencast tutorials from Jefferey Way’s Laracasts and Wes Bos’s many JavaScript courses.
So when my attendance at my local WordPress meetup started to wain due to family commitments and health issues, I started wondering if I could contribute answers to questions that had come up at the meetup, in the form of videos.
So I’ve had a go at that. First, an attempt at answering the question “What’s the difference between WP_Query, query_posts, and get_posts?”
http://press-ups.com/2016/11/wordpress-loops-queries-guide-developers/
And then a follow up where I expand on a technique referenced in the first video that I use for structuring code related to post types:
http://press-ups.com/2016/12/keeping-wordpress-post-types-code-clean-simple-classes/
I’ve really enjoyed making these. They’re not perfect, but I’ve had positive and constructive feedback on them that I’ve tried to take to heart. And I hope they are really useful for people out there.
I’m not about to be the next Jeffrey Way, or Wes Bos, but I do enjoy making these and have a setup for making them that is steadily improving. So if you have a technical question that you think I might be able to cover in a tutorial, submit a request on the Press Ups suggestions page, grab me in a meetup, or drop me a line on Twitter, and I’ll see if I can help you – and others – out. And if you have constructive feedback about any of this, feel free to drop me a line too.
People have stopped saying it of late, but perhaps I should be a teacher after all?