Toys
So I’ve been playing with WordPress for the past couple of days.
It’s kind of refreshing, really. I write filesystems for a living, so I spend my day worrying about low-level details and failure recovery and latency and microseconds of execution time, etc, etc, etc. The PHP web-tool world is so radically different that it’s almost another enterprise altogether. I like being able to just toss things together and see if they work. There’s no exhaustive regression testing. There’s no line-by-line code review. There’s no worry about debugging obscure failures from customer sites. All there is is some short but clever code that makes pretty things happen on the screen.
I’m starting to like PHP itself a lot. I’d never used the language before Sunday, and I still haven’t read any references or documentation, but the subset I’ve seen in the WordPress files and the plugins is almost stunningly straightforward and obvious. I just write little snippets and they work. That’s very very pleasing.
I started fiddling with this stuff so I could set up a food weblog for Laura, but I’m enjoying the nuts-and-bolts details of it enough that I’ll probably keep hacking at this weblog. I dunno whether I’ll end up with interesting things to say, but at least it entertains me.
And, uh, it’s a nice way to procrastinate things at work. I should probably get back to the worrying-about-data-integrity-on-shared-file-accesses problem I’m avoiding.