Tom McFarlin is a self-employed developer who works at Pressware where he works with his team to build software and provide services for others.

He’s worked with companies such as Envato serving as editor of Tuts+ Code, WordPress.com where he sales WordPress Themes such as Mayer, and worked as the technical editor on Smashing WordPress, Fourth Edition.

He also maintains a number of free plugins and tools including the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, and he blogs daily.

When he’s not at his computer, you can usually find him playing music, hanging out with his wife, his two daughters, and his two dogs, running, reading, or catching up on movies or episodes of some of his favorite TV shows.

WCATL 2015 Session – TL;DR: We’re going to be talking about the reason for and the significance of coding standards.

Sounds boring, right? Maybe.

But how many times have you inherited code from someone else only to find yourself spending half the time on the project trying to figure out what was going on with the code.

This is a point of frustration that developers have all felt at some point or another especially when inheriting projects from another agency or another group of programmers.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! In fact, coding standards make it possible to actually minimize frustration both for us and our peers.

We’re going to talk about:

• why coding standards are important
• why you should be using them
• the dangers of not using them
• how they contribute to the maintainability of your code over time

Additionally, we’ll take a look at some of the WordPress Coding Standards, important pages for reference, and talk about why these should be a standard part of any WordPress development project.