Update 04/2025: Website Work and Adventures with C

April 23, 2025

Git Learning Plan Status Update WordPress

It’s been a while since my last update, but it’s always nice to poke your head out and get the lay of the land.

I spent a couple of months writing up my tutorial series for setting up a local environment from scratch in Windows.  Then, I decided to switch to dual-booting in Linux, promptly managed to brick my Windows install (whoops), unbricked it, and then had to learn how to set up my environment all over in Linux.  I haven’t decided if I want to write a post about setting up the Linux environment.  The tutorials I found already online were much better than anything I found in Windows, so it might be redundant; if I do, it will probably be a shorter post dealing with differences more so than a full series.

I also built my first WordPress theme for an external organization.  I volunteered to do the site theme for a local organization located in my neighborhood, the Whittier Solidarity Network (GitHub repository here). This was a good chance to build something from scratch and really figure out how I wanted to organize my classes for a classic WordPress theme.  It was also my first time deciding to use dependency injection, and I’m happy with how that worked through my code.

I liked that structure enough that I went back through and refactored the theme for this site.  In addition to being an exercise in making updates to existing code, this was a chance to learn more about Git.  I had primarily used GitHub Desktop before, but since I’ve switched to Linux, I needed to start learning command line Git.  It was also a chance to make a branch, work on it, and merge it back in once complete, which I hadn’t done before.  This was also helped by the absolutely phenomenal Git Book, available on the official Git site.  This is the best piece of technical writing I’ve seen as official documentation so far–I would highly recommend checking it out!

With all that done, I’ve decided it’s time to learn C, which I’ve had on my wish list for a while.  I ended up deciding to go with a textbook this time, C Programming: A Modern Approach (2nd Edition) by K.N. King (author’s site for the book here).  This covers C89 and C99; there are newer versions, but poking around on Reddit suggests that C99 is still the most popular since it’s in a lot of legacy uses.  And at any rate, I imagine once I learn the basics, I could pick up changed versions easily enough.

Posted In: Education