My Development Setup/Flow

Developers seem to love to hear about how other developers work, so I thought I’d try to capture my entire environment, from end to end, in a single post. This will change (has changed) over time and depending on the project/company/whatever, but this is how things are for me right now. A couple of points up front:

  • I work for Automattic, so a lot of this is influenced by our internal policies/security/workflow.
  • I don’t always use all components of this “system”. I’ll try to detail when I do/don’t use certain parts of it as I go.

OK, here goes.

Note: This turned into a little bit of a summary of how we work internally at Automattic as well. Oh well, maybe it’ll provide some inspiration, I think we do some pretty cool things.

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Closing a Window in JavaScript

If you’re having trouble closing a window using JavaScript, this might help. I’ve had this problem sometimes in Chrome in particular when I open a window, then follow through a bunch of redirects or something. It seems to lose track of the fact that I “control” this window object, so it doesn’t allow me to close it. This fixes that:

window.open('', '_self', '');
window.close();

Basically it reopens the window on itself, then immediately closes itself. Neat. Haven’t had any problems with it not working in other browsers, but I also haven’t super-widely tested it.