Personal Details

Name: Mert Yazicioglu
Email: mert@mertyazicioglu.com
Personal Website: http://www.mertyazicioglu.com
Skype ID: mertyazicioglu
GTalk: merty92@gmail.com
IRC nick: merty
Phone number: 00905436721442
School Name: Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey)
Years completed: 3 years
PHP Experience Level: Advanced
WordPress Experience Level: Current User, Plugin Developer and Core Contributor.

Project Details

Describe your idea in detail: Although WordPress.org has been enhanced both design-wise and feature-wise, profiles.wordpress.org did not see much love. Being a plugin developer and a core contributor, I would personally love to interact with the other developers, without feeling the need of leaving the .org ecosystem.

Here are some of the things I am planning to do to improve the profiles on profiles.wordpress.org and more importantly, the .org ecosystem:

• Better Representation of the Information:  Currently, there are 6 pieces of data that one can provide to customise his/her profile: Name, About Me, Website URL, Location, Company, Interests. These are all needed and should be kept but using a better way to represent them.
• Latest Posts: The user should be able to provide his/her WordPress-powered blog from which we can fetch the last 10 blog posts and display on their profile.
• Links to Profiles on Other Sites: Recently, Otto shared a method we can use to tell Google that we are the author of the plugin. That method includes placing a link on our WordPress profiles to our Google+ profiles, which is only possible by adding an anchor tag inside the About Me section. This is currently the only way and I think unfortunately is a dirty way. We should be able to link to our profiles on other sites such as: Deviantart, Dribble, Facebook, GitHub, Google, Twitter, etc. That way, people can follow each other on the other social networks and/or see other works of each other. I would personally like to see a theme creator’s other creative works on Dribble or a plugin author’s other projects on GitHub.
• Showcase: There are many people who have authored so many plugins and/or themes that a person who looks at his/her profile can easily miss an impressive and useful one because all the plugins/themes are listed in uniform. A good solution to this would be providing a separate section called Showcase, to which users can place 5 of their best work to show themselves.
• A Better Way to List Plugins: Themes have their previews shown while the plugins have nothing. We can use the banner images of the plugins while listing them which would motivate plugin authors to create better-looking banner images and make profile pages more alive.
• Enhanced Activity Stream: The current state of the activity stream is completely unreadable. I’m planning to make it more feed-like and present more information for each feed item. For example; we can show the user’s reply as well, if the user “Replied to a topic in the WP.org support forums” or instead of saying “plugins Trac, Changeset [691287]: Updated FAQ”, we can say “Mert Yazicioglu updated WordPress Move” and below we can provide the changelog. Of course, the feed will be redesigned to be able to house these changes.
• Gamification: This should probably be the key feature of the new profiles. We should implement a badge system to tell the active and passive developers/designers apart. Contributing to the core, writing unit tests, authoring a plugin, authoring a theme, authoring X number of plugins, authoring X number of themes, helping on forums, contributing to X number of releases in a row etc. all could bring a badge to the user to keep them motivated. Personally, I would be more comfortable with using the plugin of a user who is active on support forums and have contributed to the last 3 major releases, for instance. This would also cause the other plugin authors to feel the need of showing themselves and at the end of the day, we would have more core contributors, more active support forums and more plugin authors.
• Following Each Other: I’m not 100% sure about this but the ability to follow a plugin author or a theme creator to keep oneself up-to-date with their future work seem to be a good idea.
• Profiles Homepage: Currently, there is no homepage for profiles and profiles.wordpress.org simply redirects to wordpress.org. I’m planning to create Profiles Homepage to house the gamification data such as: The Newest Core Contributors, The Newest Plugin Authors, The Newest Theme Creators, The Recent Rockstars etc. and a feed on which we show the recent activities of the users that the user follows. Activities on that feed can include the core contributions and the support forum activity, in order to motivate their followers.

Using such features, we can both increase the engagement on .org profiles and the overall contribution to WordPress. WordPress developers should be able to fully represent themselves using their profiles on WordPress.org, that will be my aim.

What have you done so far with this idea:

• Visited 20+ websites and studied the way their profiles work to work out the common needs of profile pages.
• Browsed profiles on .org to see how profiles currently look like in cases like when there are no plugins, when there are too many plugins, when there are a mix of plugins and themes, when there are no activities etc.
• Drew a few mock-ups on how it should look like (will share on my blog).

Plugin, theme, or core: Technically, neither. The work will be done on the codebase of wordpress.org.

Anticipated challenges: I cannot think of anything that would cause the failure of the project.

Potential mentors: No preference.

Schedule of Deliverables

Milestones and deliverables schedule:

May 27th – June 9th – Explaining the details of my project to the WordPress community and asking for their ideas.
June 10th – June 16th - Deciding which features and the suggestions of the community should be implemented and how with my mentor.
June 17th – Coding begins!
June 24th – The codebase for Links to Profiles on Other Sites and Showcase should be complete by now.
July 1st - The codebase for Latest Posts and Enhanced Activity Stream should be complete by now.
July 8th – The codebase for Gamification should be complete by now.
July 15th - The new UI of profiles (including the other UI-related features listed above) should be complete by now.
July 22nd - The Profiles Homepage should be complete by now.
July 29th – August 2nd – Mid-term Evaluations
August 12th – All the known bug fixes should be done by now.
August 19th – Another round of feedbacks from the users should be gathered by now.
August 26th – The necessary changes reported by the users should be done by now.
September 2nd - Code should be checked for the last time to see if any improvements are needed, by now.
September 9th - Any necessary documentation should be written by now.
September 16th - The project is completed!

Other commitments: Will have more than plenty of time to work on the project.

Open Source Development Experience

PHP Experience: I have been a PHP developer for 8 years and have been mainly using OOP for the last 5 years. To see my code, you can check out my plugins on WordPress plugin directory and my profile on GitHub. I have also participated to GSoC in 2011 and again worked with WordPress. I developed WordPress Move as a project and successfully completed GSoC 2011. Currently I’m working as Jr. Software Developer at Izlesene.com which is pretty much Turkey’s YouTube, where we are using PHP as the main language.

WordPress Experience:

• Converted our university’s online newspaper to WordPress which was using the framework and the CMS I wrote before.
  http://www.gazetebilkent.com
• Worked at a company as a WordPress Developer last summer, where I developed 4 different products using WordPress. Recommendation from that job: (Can be seen on LinkedIn)
  “Mert is a genuine talent as a Web Developer especially WordPress, he is really hardworking and highly responsible person, I wish to work with him again.”
• Wrote a patch for the Ticket #16433
  http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/16433
• Wrote a patch for the Ticket #22451
  http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22451
• Wrote a patch for the Ticket #22524
  http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22524
• Wrote a patch for the Ticket #19470
  http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19470
• Wrote a patch for the Ticket #17983
  http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/17983
• Successfully developed WordPress Move during GSoC 2011 and have been developing it ever since: (50,000+ downloads)
  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-move/
• Developed a plugin called Image Rotation Fixer: (1,000+ downloads)
  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/image-rotation-fixer/
• Developed two child themes called Code Black and Code Red:
  http://github.com/merty/code-black
  http://github.com/merty/code-red

Other Open Source/Free Software Experience:

• I contributed SkateBoard project with a few bug reports and fixes but the project discontinued.
• I participated Google’s Highly Open Participation Contest and helped Joomla!
• I voluntarily contributed translations of Facebook, Joomla!, Simple Machines Forum, SchoolTool, SkateBoard, Twitter and Ubuntu.
• I am currently leading the Turkish translation of Grooveshark.
• I released some of my scripts under the GNU/GPLv2 license on various platforms but lost track of most of them due to changes made on those platforms.
• Some other work of mine can be found on GitHub.

Work Experience

Work Experience:

• Jr. Software Developer at Izlesene.com (Turkey’s YouTube) (Ongoing)
• Director of Online Operations – GazeteBilkent (Online Newspaper of our University) (WordPress-powered)
• Software Developer – Chipping-Potatoes Market Research Website
  Developed a poll system that generates detailed statistical reports using JS (AJAX), PHP and MySQL.
• Lead Website Designer – Europe@School Website Design Contest 2006 (Won the 2nd prize!) (HTML, CSS, JS)
• Facebook – Volunteer Translator
• Grooveshark – Volunteer Translator (Lead) (Ongoing)
• Joomla! – Volunteer Translator
• SchoolTool – Volunteer Translator
• Simple Machines Forum – Volunteer Translator
• SkateBoard – Volunteer Translator (Also contributed with a few bug reports but the project discontinued)
• Twitter – Volunteer Translator
• Ubuntu – Volunteer Translator

Apart from those, I have coded many scripts with different complexities. They range from an online dictionary script to a full-fledged business cataloging system. I did not mention them because those projects either discontinued or disappeared without my knowledge. I do not exactly know who uses which of my scripts right now as I have provided most of them for free on various platforms.

Academic Experience

Academic Institution: Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey)

Current Program: Computer Technology and Information Systems for a BS degree. I am about to complete my junior year.

Anticipated Graduation: 2014

Academic Performance: I am a High Honors Student with a GPA of 3.49/4.00.

The technical courses I took so far are:

• CTIS151 Introduction to Programming (Grade: A)
• CTIS152 Algorithms and Data Structures (Grade: A)
• CTIS163 Discrete Mathematics (Grade: B)
• CTIS164 Technical Mathematics with Programming (Grade: A)
• CTIS165 Fundamentals of Information Systems (Grade: B+)
• CTIS166 Information Technologies (Grade: B)
• CTIS 251 Object Oriented Programming (Grade: A)
• CTIS 252 Programming in Java (Grade: A)
• CTIS 255 Web Technologies I (Grade: A)
• CTIS 256 Web Technologies II (Grade: A)
• CTIS 259 Database Management Systems and Applications (Grade: A-)
• CTIS 261 Computer Networks I (Grade: B)
• CTIS 262 Computer Networks II (Grade: B-)
• CTIS 264 Computer Algorithms (Grade: B)
• CTIS 359 Principles of Software Engineering (Grade: B-)
• CTIS 361 Contemporary Application Development (Grade: A+)

GSoC for Credit: No.

References:

• Serkan Genç (sgenc@bilkent.edu.tr) (Instructor)
• Murat Yakıcı (murat.yakici@gmail.com) (Previous Employer)
• Pete Mall (pete@jointforcestech.com) (My Mentor from GSoC 2011)

Why WordPress

You’re applying to work with WordPress during GSoC because: I chose WordPress because it is one of the few PHP projects I adore and love to work with. I have been amazed with its extensibility since the day I first used it. I have also participated to GSoC in 2011 and again worked with WordPress. I developed WordPress Move as a project and successfully completed GSoC 2011.

After GSoC, you envision your involvement with WordPress will be: Ongoing, definitely. I have been contributing to WordPress since GSoC 2011 and also trying to spread the use of it among my acquaintances. I absolutely love everything about WordPress, from the software itself to the community!

The post GSoC 2013 Proposal: Enhance Profiles.WordPress.org appeared first on Mert Yazicioglu.

Today I found some time to revise it and created a monochromatic theme with a different set of fonts and pretty much the same layout. In other words, the theme you are looking at right now.

You can get both Code Red and Code Black from GitHub as always.

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See the project on GitHub…

Update: It now supports AWS S3!

The post Simple File Uploader appeared first on Mert Yazicioglu.

Changelog for 1.3.2

• Fixed the bug causing problems with other plugins such as Gravity Forms.

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#1: Do Not Let Others Interfere

This is probably the biggest problem I suffered from. People think that since they can use a web browser, they have the necessary knowledge and experience to criticise the design of a web page. By the way, I’m not talking about constructive or valid criticisms here. I’m talking about questions like “What’s wrong with Comic Sans?” or “Using human friendly timestamps such as ’2 hours ago’ is confusing, it should be dd/mm/yyyy.”. I think you got the gist of it.

I’m always open to new ideas so long as they make sense but these are just tiring, especially when the person you are talking to resist not to understand.

#2: Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries

This is actually what I should have done to prevent #1 from happening. Every single person in an organisation should have a specific duty and should not cross boundaries by disturbing others by commenting on everything, without thinking twice. Sure, everyone should be able to comment on others’ works but if the quality of those comments are not above a certain level, those comments just become annoying and make you regret your decision to join the team.

Establishing well-defined boundaries is a must, unless you are working with awesome A-level people which practically never happens.

#3: Prepare Yourself for Being a Scapegoat

Remember when your decisions were always criticised and you decided not to listen to them because their comments did not make any sense? Good. Because the moment something goes wrong with your decision, they will instantly say “You should have listened to me”. Do not even try to tell them how it would be a lot worse if you followed their suggestions. They just won’t get it. Accept your well-deserved(!) failure and move on.

#4: Do Not Stop Yourself from Speaking the Truth

Just you are enjoying their friendship does not mean you cannot disagree with them or you cannot uncover what they are hiding. Furthermore, when the truth meets the sunshine, the others will think you were a part of that thing they were hiding because: a) You are their friend. b) You did not tell. Never, ever, choose hiding the truth in favor of protecting others. They would not do the same for you. Sorry, sad but true.

Being friends and co-workers are completely different things, so keep them separate. If you are the only one who can separate the two, you should start considering leaving before things get ugly.

#5: Do Not Make It Your Top Priority

Stop for a second and look around you. If you are working harder than others, doing your duty properly and even cleaning the mess that others create, you should consider decreasing the priority of that organisation in your life. You can work on better things instead or just use that time to sit back and relax. You will see them leaving right away when they realize that they have to work a little harder.

Don’t torture yourself if the project is not going anywhere and the cause of it is not you. Don’t spend your time for nothing. They don’t deserve to work with you.

#6: Leave When You Stop Having Fun

You are not a part of this because your life depends on it, right? Then you should always take the fun factor into account. Taking things you are working on seriously is a good thing but if you do this for absolutely everything, it will just start to secretly demotivate you and actually harm you.

You may think that you can actually prevent these things from happening by changing others. It may sound a simple thing but it’s a fact that you cannot change people for good. You can change them for some time but they will soon become who they actually are and your efforts won’t change anything at the end. This will only help you to postpone the inevitable consequences.

Don’t let others suck the life out of you. Life is too short to work on things you are not enjoying.

The post 6 Things I Learned from Working with Others appeared first on Mert Yazicioglu.

Yesterday, I received an email from Codecademy, about the new Ruby track they made available. As I haven’t used Ruby for the last few years, I thought it would be nice to do some practice. When I opened the sign in page, I realised that I forgot the password of my account. Naturally, I started trying to guess what my email-password combo was. Right after my first attempt, the login paged enlightened me with his wisdom:

Now, this is not about Codecademy specifically. This is about all the websites that fail to meet a user’s simplest expectation. You may spend weeks or months to provide a better user experience but what good is it if your users cannot login to your service? User experience is not something that you should care about only after the user logs in. It is not rocket science. It takes only a few more lines of code to tell the user whether the email they provided is on file or not.

Saying Invalid email or password. is no different from saying No. or Nuh-uh.. There’s no need to be Captain Obvious, user is already aware of the fact that the email-password combo he supplied were not good enough. He just wants to log in to your service and do his business. Why don’t you just help him by saying something like: Invalid password. or The email address you provided is not registered.. We are not talking about hundreds of possibilities here, right?

Long story short, please just spend an extra 5 minutes to precisely tell what was wrong with the email-password combo the user supplied. After all, if the user cannot log in, everything else is worthless.

Note: I’m aware of the fact that this makes attackers’ jobs easier. However, many websites (including Codecademy) tell you whether the email address you provided is registered or not, when you visit the Forgot Password page. If you are displaying a message such as: “If the email address you provided is registered, you will receive an email shortly.” when a user wants to reset their password, then I can actually believe that your main concern is security and that’s what prevented you from displaying a clearer error message.

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Reason #1: Working on so many projects at the same time

Just like everyone else, I enjoy working on a handful of projects, I really do because I always thought it was something that motivated me to do greater things. While I still think it seriously motivates to work on more things, I realized that over the time it actually starts to demotivate you. This is actually a result of reasons #2 and #3 as you try harder to work on all those projects simultaneously; the amount of work that gets done, your enthusiasm and your motivation gets split.

Reason #2: Spending ages to build a prototype

This is probably where most of us get bored of our projects. We are building prototypes as if they will be final products. Surely it depends on the complexity of the project you are working on but mostly it is not impossible to build a prototype in a week. After all, a prototype is something you should completely get rid off immediately after you get some feedback regarding your project.

If you are building a prototype that can be used as a base for your project, then you are a bad prototyper.

If you are building on a prototype you should have dumped, then you are a bad programmer.

Reason #3: Consistently postponing the release date

Assuming that you are not building a complete ERP solution all by yourself, you don’t need to worry about making changes after the release. You will have plenty of time until your product gets some traction, so just make sure the key features are there and you should be good to go.

There is a great read regarding this, by Matt Mullenweg of WordPress: 1.0 is the Loneliest Number.

Reason #4: Working on things that do not teach something new

I absolutely hate working on things that do not teach me or make me learn something new. It’s just pointless and secretly demotivating, nothing else. At some point in time, you will dump your project because of this very reason or because of a reason that is a result of this reason. You can either stop today and move onto another project of yours or just waste your time for nothing. It’s your call.

I wrote all of this down as a note to my future self. It’s both sad and great to see your bad habits. It’s sad because you see how you wasted your time for no reason for a really long time. It’s great because you can finally get rid of your bad habits and move forward.

I’m happy to realize all these things about myself at an early age and I hope I don’t repeat these mistakes again.

The post Why Do We Dump Our Greatest Projects? appeared first on Mert Yazicioglu.

No need to explain further, here is the link: http://usesthis.com/

Have fun!

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The Lost Type Co-Op is a type foundry where you pay-what-you-want to download a certain font. I’m sure you’re already wondering if you could pay $0. The answer is YES. You can pay as much as you want whether it’s $0 or  $1000, it’s totally up to you. Now here is the cool part: Lost Type takes no cut of sales, and holds no funds. That means, all the money you pay for a font directly goes to the designer of the font, not the site.

As you might have already realized, they are not yet-another-type-foundry. You can see that in the fonts they are distributing too. While most of the others keep on selling the same or similar boring fonts with their competitors, at The Lost Type Co-Op you can find really nice, different and awesome-looking fonts.

If you are wondering about the licensing agreement that comes with the fonts, here it is:

You may:

1) Use this font in commercial design.
2) Use this font in personal design.

You may not:

1) Re-distribute this font by any means, for free, or for a fee.
2) Alter this font for re-distribution.

Definitely check them out if you also enjoy typography.

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Let’s cut it short this time and hope I will return with new blog posts :)

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