In his monumental book – The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Prof. Eric Raymond shares a valuable quote:

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch

– Prof. Eric Raymond

As developers, or as software engineering students, we sometimes become too sterile to have an itch. We perhaps end up seeking ideas or motivation far more than what we can imagine on our own. Unless we find that purpose, we barely crutch beyond “hello world” and get out of the grasps of tutorial hell.

I entered the software engineering bandwagon rather recently. It was born while i was having a good time as a technical support staff. The bugs and feature requests that I found while attending to customers, made me ask myself – “What if I could solve these issues on my own? What if I could fix this issue, or build this feature by my own?”. My users’ itch is what got me started, that in a way, became my own. There is joy in seeing a complete circle from a user’s request, to seeing it fulfilled and seeing them smile! A great place to be – as a product owner, as an engineer, as a support staff and at so many layers that you can think of.

Customers or users can be great pointers, if we wonder where to start. Very recently, I took a peek into the WooCommerce support forums on WordPress.org, and had the opportunity to learn from two use cases.

Case 1 – A bug 🐞

A user reported about a “Local Pickup settings” link leading to a blank page. I used a WordPress Playground instance with a WooCommerce blueprint to replicate their steps ( you can set it up in seconds! ) . I was able to spot an open issue related to this. I found this to be a great opportunity to submit a bug fix. Folks from the WooCommerce team were kind to review it immediately and merge it!

The issue was not a top priority, the fix was small too. But it was nice to see the complete circle from how it caused a confusion to a user ( for real!! ) and how the patch would help avoid this in the future!

Case 2 – Feature request – 🎩

A user had a feature request of a “how do I” post on the forum. They wanted to exclude the value of selected products from being counted towards the threshold for Free Shipping. To elaborate, if they are selling discounted gift cards, and normal merchandise with free shipping above $200. They do not want the value of gift cards to be considered while counting $200.

In my last job I worked almost three years on WooPayments where I had good exposure to frontend as well as backend. I had a craving though to learn more about plugin development from scratch – the experience of searching for hooks and filters and building a real solution.

I took this use case as a challenge and built my first extension in two days. – Free Shipping Excluder !

Update! – The Free Shipping Excluder plugin is now available on the WordPress.org Repository! You may download, or install it from within WP-Admin through there.

Both the users above, gave me a specific goal to achieve and learn in the process. I was able to get more familiar with the WooCommerce codebase, and one more step towards building plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress in a way I would like!

Businesses may grow and fall, jobs may come and go, but thanks to human need and users, there will always be a reason to learn, serve and grow 🙂 !

Keep scratching!