Dominik and Steffen are long-term friends, the founders of the WordPress agency Bleech – and total nerds when it comes to websites. Always having the user in mind they critically question the status quo in web development. By trying out the latest technologies they improve common approaches or develop new ones. Listen to them when they discuss current developments in web technologies and learn more about their tools, techniques and their philosophy.
In today's episode, Steffen and Dominik explore the pros and cons of deployment strategies for websites. What's the difference between continuous deployment and continuous integration? Which strategy is worth trying and which one should you consider leaving alone? Highlights00:00 Intro00:13 What is continuous deployment06:42 Buddy.works08:46 Github Actions10:50 Speed of Buddy15:18 Docker19:42 Managed Hosting20:34 AWS22:07 All-Inkl25:39…
In this episode, Steffen and Dominik discuss the concept of global and translatable options for WordPress websites. Components can have options that are either limited to where they are inserted, or that apply to all components of a certain type on the site, even for different languages. This concept makes it easier for developers and…
In today's episode, we discuss the latest update to Google's Lighthouse tool. Version 10 introduces significant changes to the way Page Speed scores are calculated. We discuss the key features of the update and how they might affect website owners and developers. Upon closer inspection, we spotted an important change that hasn't been announced. So…
This time Steffen and Dominik reflect on coding custom designs and the challenges faced with writing CSS. To create a solid base stylesheet in combination with minimal styles for a website is an important starting point. However, it is challenging to create things by hand, interlinking layout and design, and maintaining components. Frameworks could be…
Data modeling is the process of creating a conceptual representation of your data. It's a crucial step in building effective databases and applications. In this episode we discuss why it is important to look at both aspects of data modeling: how data is structured and how it is presented in the user interface for those…
In this episode we discuss web components and their potential to revolutionize the web. Web components have been around for a while and aim to provide a standardized way of authoring front-end JavaScript, but they never really took off due to the missing parts of the spec. We explore various types of web components, the…
WordPress Starter Themes are important for custom WordPress web development. Above all, they put developer experience first and challenge the status quo of best practices. We discuss the differences between a developer starter theme and a multi-purpose theme, and why using a starter theme can give you a big head start in your custom theme…
It's still a complicated task to optimize images for different devices, screen sizes, and pixel densities. In this episode we discuss the challenges of creating perfect responsive images and explore various techniques that can help optimize images. Highlights00:00 Intro00:50 Why is it so hard?03:56 What do you need?05:04 The sizes attribute explained09:39 Library: lazysizes13:22 Couldn't…
Jared is the author of Timber, a powerful development library for WordPress with more than 1 million downloads. Jared started his career working at newspapers. He and his partners saw the importance of the backend user experience in digital publications and started using WordPress to develop custom built WordPress interfaces for large-scale websites. What does…
Let's dive into the hotly-anticipated arrival of container queries! We’ll discuss whether it’s worth jumping on them now, what strategies you can follow, and the potential pitfalls to watch out for, including limited browser support, increased design and development complexity, and the potential performance issues. That said, let’s not be afraid, but embrace the future!…
JavaScript can add significant weight to a website and is hard to optimize. JavaScript hydration concepts can significantly optimize JavaScript loading, parsing, and execution. We talk about the various techniques and how we implemented a custom islands architecture into Flynt, our WordPress Starter Theme for developers. Highlights00:00 Intro00:38 What is JavaScript Hydration?02:58 Strategies of Hydration04:41…
As a WordPress agency, we have decided not to use Gutenberg, the block editor for WordPress. When it was first introduced, we were excited about the potential improvements it offered over the classic editor, but after trying it out, we found that it had several major issues that prevent us from using it for our…
Everyone is talking about ChatGPT right now, just like us. What are our first experiences with the AI tool? How will it affect coding challenges in the developer application process? And how do we evaluate the relevance of AI tools for the future of coding? Highlights00:00 Intro00:38 First experiences03:30 Where does ChatGPT get the data…
When you're working with websites, you can't ignore the WebP image format. But what makes this format better than other image formats? And is it really practical and will stay? In this episode, Steffen and Dominik dive deep into image formats and discuss how to use WebP. Highlights00:00 Intro00:48 How do you optimize image loading?01:22…
How do you make sure every developer on a website project sees the same content across environments? How do we maintain stable development environments for very old websites? And on which environments do we present code changes to our clients? In this episode Dominik and Steffen give insights how they set up the deployment and…
