Nate Finch
Full Stack Developer
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Nate has been working on the web since 2011. He loves web development because it is the perfect mix of problem solving, helping people, and lifelong learning. As a Full Stack Developer at Strattic.com (by Elementor), he helps build serverless integrations for WordPress.
Prior to joining Strattic, Nate worked as VP of Development at TheDigitalRing.com, where he split his time between developing websites and developing developers. He's spent the bulk of his web career freelancing, working with hundreds of clients through platforms like Toptal and Codeable, and even completed a brief stint as a web engineer with 10up.
Nate collects masters degrees, has traveled to six continents, lived on four, speaks Spanish, and outside of work, family, friends, food, coffee, and cooking are his favorite activities. He lives in Wisconsin with his wonderful wife and two daughters.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Using WordPress as an API
The Jamstack has captured the minds of many front end and JS developers over the last few years. And for good reason! It's a secure, scaleable, and enjoyable way to build sites and apps.
The rise of the Jamstack has also been accompanied by a rise in headless CMS as a service (HCMSaaS?).
While HCMSaaSes promise a lot, WordPress is the "elephpant" in the room. With 20 years in the CMS space, over 40% of all sites are on WordPress.
WordPress has moved rapidly over the last few years to bring itself into the modern web era.
Here's how you can use it to source your data and assets.
Serverless Services For Serverlful CMSes
As static and headless CMSes become more common and mainstream, it’s important to know how to build solutions for dynamic actions these sites make. Common examples are form submissions, site search, real-time updates, etc. How can you build dynamic solutions for static sites?
Enter serverless functions and services! If you’ve built custom plugins or themes before and can use the command line you’ll feel right at home.
Can I still benefit from serverless functions and services if I’ve running a CMS like WordPress or Drupal on a server? Absolutely! Anytime you can offload processing from your own server to someone else’s is going to improve user experience on your site.
Takeaways:
I will give everyone access to a Git repo they can use/reference as a starting point for this workshop.
In this workshop, we'll cover:
- What serverless functions and services are.
- Establish a mental framework for when and why to create services.
- Main players for our use case: Serverless Framework deploying to AWS, and Netlify Functions. (It would be great if they could create an account beforehand)
- Code-along to create several services for a static WordPress site, including creating your own webhook, “breaking news” service, and more.
- Learn to deploy functions and services to different providers.
- We’ll also look at the cost associated with these providers and how to evaluate projected costs.
Less Snark, More Spark ✨
How can you be the developer people want to hire, work with, and promote?
Good question!
Even the most introverted, self-sufficient developer interacts with other people. Sometimes these folks are a joy to work with, sometimes not. Sometimes as a developer, you might be the difficult one to work with (we’ve all been that snarky developer a time or two!). These touch-points with others can lead us to being unproductive. However, these unproductive interactions can be remedied with a framework to help us and the folks we work with communicate more clearly so we can get things done.
Unit Testing, from 0 to 1 and beyond
Do you want to start testing your codebase but don't know where to start?
Unit testing can be difficult to get going, with questions like:
- How do I set up unit tests?
- What even *are* unit tests?
- How do I make an assertion? (again, what even IS an assertion!?)
- Do I use PHPUnit, Pest, or... something else?
- What is mocking?
- Oh no, I have a legacy code base and the code is pretty much untestable... What do I do now?
Oh, and we'll also cover code coverage so we're covered... 😏
We'll go through all of this and maybe a bit more.
We'll also look at refactoring a classic piece of legacy code to make it more testable.
php[tek] 2023 Sessionize Event
Web Developer Conference '22 Sessionize Event
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