Get to know Carl Alexander, a PHP developer all the way from Montréal, Canada.
A bit more about Carl in his own words:
I live and breath advanced programming topics (and memes). I share a lot of my passion for those topics on my website where I publish articles on a regular basis.
It’s my way to help you with these hard-to-learn topics. That’s also why I’m excited to speak at WordCamp Los Angeles. It’s another way for me to help you.
Besides that, I’ve been a WordPress Montréal organizer since 2010. I also help organize other WordPress events during the year.
What should we know about you that you haven’t included in your brief, third-person, professional biography?
Though question! It’s hard to know what’s relevant to someone else. So I’ll go with one relevant fact and a random one!
Relevant: I’ve been programming since the 3rd grade. Did my first robotics project in the 5th grade.
Random: I lived in a living room from May 2012 to May 2016.
What’s the best programming meme available for the amusement of WordPress theme and plugin architects?
Two great resources for endless amusement. First, there’s “dev practices” that Tom McFarlin created. (Well, I think he did lol) The other great one is “Commit Logs From Last Night” which is a hilarious take on “Texts From Last Night“.
Imagine you’re allowed to link to or briefly pitch something, what do imagine?
I’ll assume you mean pitch something by me! [Editors Note: Carl assumed correctly] I write a lot on my personal site about object-oriented programming and WordPress. I also offer a free email course to help you start using it.
For the rest of your life, you’re only allowed either indexed arrays or associative arrays, not both. You can’t mix them and you can’t change later, which do you choose any why?
Associative arrays for sure! You can pretty much mimic an indexed array with an associative array, but not the other way around. This might be considered cheating on the question! 😛
Without spilling the secret sauce of the presentation, what’s one simple piece of array advice we can start implementing today?
You don’t need to do an isset check before doing an empty check. (e.g. if (isset($vars[1]) AND !empty($vars[1])) { ) The isset check is redundant here. The empty check also checks if the value is set before doing its own tests.
At WCLAX 2016 Carl will be presenting on Use PHP arrays like a boss.