DEV Community: Yeison Lapaix

What skills should have a software developer?

Yeison Lapaix — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 03:30:26 +0000

Usually when the people talk about what you should know about software developer give you a list of programming languages and technologies to learn. The problem is that usually is a very big list and it seems to have an end.

That list grows and grows all the time.

For a lot of time, I was thinking that gives a simple track of that list will give success in this career but think what? That's not true.

The reality of this is that learning a lot of things it will not guaranty your success in this career.

But don't misunderstand me, have a lot of technical skills like know how to code in different languages and new technologies is very good and help to be a better developer, but in my experience and what I see in others developer with success the commons constant is not technical.

Skills like soft-skills, self-taught, good memory, curiosity, and others, allow a software developer to go to another level. These are skills that allow you to interact and have better communication with the people and help you to be a better developer learning different things that complement your knowledge.

Try to analyze examples like Bill Gate, Steve Jobs and others leaders in software and technology industry and your possible note that their main skills are not technical, rather they have more negotiation, social and communication skills.

And you?

What skills you think should have a software developer?

Check for more tips in my original article: 5 Skills A Good Software Developer Should Have in 2019.

Connecting to WordPress using C#

Yeison Lapaix — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 15:11:41 +0000

In this post, we will see how to connect to a Wordpress website using C# and make publications using the WordpressPCL library in three easy steps.

WordPress is a great CMS that allows developers and people who don't need a lot of software development skills to create websites with awesome functionalities. Therefore, is one of the most popular tools used actually to build websites.

This CMS is very flexible to create custom functionalities, although is very possible that exists like a plugin that can be installed on the site. WordPress has a big community of developers with a lot of experience with the platform where you can find solutions for almost all the issues you can have.

The thing with WordPress is that was built in PHP, so if you don't know the language you can lose time in the process to learn and then implement what you want to do.

Next, We will see how to configure a visual studio project with c# to connect to a website with WordPress, which is a good solution for .Net developers who don't have good knowledge of PHP.

1. Configure WordPress API in your website (Required for versions below 4.7)

Note: The plugin WP REST API that enables the Rest API was merged to WordPress since version 4.7, so if you have an equal or greater version, just jump to step 2.

To configure your site to have enabled the API that allows reading and writing on WordPress. The prerequisite to connect to WordPress with WordpressPCL is to install the following plugins on your website:

Then to complete de JWT configuration is necessary to add some modifications to the .htaaccess file:

First, enable HTTP Authorization Header adding the following:

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} ^(.*)
    RewriteRule ^(.*) - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%1]

Then enable the WPENGINE adding this code in the same .htacess file:


    SetEnvIf Authorization "(.*)" HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=$1

The JWT needs a secret key to sign the token this secret key must be unique and never revealed.

To add the secret key edit your wp-config.php file and add a new constant called JWT_AUTH_SECRET_KEY.

    define('JWT_AUTH_SECRET_KEY', 'your-top-secrect-key');

You can generate and use a string from here https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

You can see all the details from the documentation here.

2. Install WordpressPCL from Nuget Packages

Now you need to install the Wordpress nuget package from Visual Studio called WordpressPCL. To open nugget packages manager do right click on your project in Visual Studio and then click to Manage Nuget Package.

Then search WordPressPCL and do a right click on Install.

You can also install the packages using the nuget packages console inserting the following commands:

Install-Package WordPressPCL -Version 1.5.0

What you can do with WordpressPCL? Well, the following table shows the supported methods that you have access to uses.

Now that we have configured and installed all that you need, let's see how we can create, update and query data from Wordpress.

Example 1: Connecting to Wordpress

To connect to Wordpress client you can use the class WordPressClient that accept in his constructor the URL of your website. Example http://domain-example.com/wp-json/. Where the /wp-jon/ is the default path to the Wordpress REST API.

private static async Task<WordPressClient> GetClient()
        {
            // JWT authentication
            var client = new WordPressClient("http://wordpress-domain.com/wp-json/");
            client.AuthMethod = AuthMethod.JWT;
            await client.RequestJWToken("user", "password");
            return client;
        }

Example 2: Creating and Updating Data

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using WordPressPCL;
using WordPressPCL.Models;

namespace WordPressTest
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            CreatePost().Wait();
        }

        private static async Task CreatePost()
        {
            try
            {
                WordPressClient client = await GetClient();
                if (await client.IsValidJWToken())
                {
                    var post = new Post
                    {
                        Title = new Title("New post test"),
                        Content = new Content("Content for new post.")
                    };
                    await client.Posts.Create(post);
                }
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Error:" + e.Message);
            }
        }

        private static async Task<WordPressClient> GetClient()
        {
            // JWT authentication
            var client = new WordPressClient("http://wordpress-domain.com/wp-json/");
            client.AuthMethod = AuthMethod.JWT;
            await client.RequestJWToken("user", "password");
            return client;
        }
    }
}

Example 3: Getting data

To query data is easy as you can see below:


    var client = GetClient();

    //Getting all the post
    var posts =await client.Posts.GetAll();

    //Getting one post
     var onePost = await client.Posts.GetByID(1);

You can download these examples from my Github account in the project WordpressTest and for more information about the WordpressPCL API, you can check the official documentation here: Github WordpressPCL Documentation.

I hope that I can help you to have a good introduction to of how to connect with a Wordpress website using .Net.

Please let me know if you have any dude.

Original post: Step By Step to Connect to Wordpress Using C Sharp

Why you need to learn SEO?

Yeison Lapaix — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 20:15:32 +0000

Original Post: https://goo.gl/8crQA2

If you are a web developer I think SEO is an essential skill you need to have in your profile, not because is a plus to your curriculum, is because can be the variable to the success or the fail of your project.

Before everything, you may are asking, what the f*#k is SEO?

Well, SEO is the way you use the pieces of knowledge of how works the search engine like Google or Bing to increase the traffic to your site and have more visits or potential clients.

Almost all kind of project that involves a creation of a website needs to have visibility on the web and if you don’t believe is necessary, you could be losing a good opportunity to increase your business.

Today day, everybody has a smartphone and the people use to search for information at any time and every moment, for a simple example, suppose if somebody is looking for a fast food restaurant in your city is very possible that check google and type something like “fast food restaurants in Santo Domingo” or only “fast food restaurant”, the search engine will show the most relevant information and if your site doesn’t have good SEO strategy is very possible that doesn’t appear on the result list.

The process of apply SEO on a website is a combination of many tasks. A basic implementation has the following steps.

Define a Strategy

First of all, you need to define the objective of your website. So in this step in necessary to identify:

Who is your audience? What they need and what products or services they are looking for.
The objective of the business: What is the main goal and what they expect to have with the SEO implementation.
The persons that are going to be involved in the process: The employees that are going to support you to obtain the information needed to complete the SEO strategy.
Define the kind of content you’re going to publish: What the content is about? in this step is important to check what is relevant to the users and what are the trends of your audience what they are looking for on the internet.
Check who are your competitors: recognize who are your main competitors and check what they do to have a good ranking on search engine.

Keywords Research

The keywords are the words that users use to search on search engine. Is important to select the correct keywords that match with the market that is searching a certain topic. The process of keywords research is considered one of the more important to apply for SEO because is when you make the investigation of the market and business context to understand how the clients search your product on the internet, then you can adapt your page with the content that satisfied with that search.

There are some free tools like keyword planner in Google Adwords and Google Trends that can help you to make a research about what keywords are using the users and wish one are more relevant to your content.

Create Content

When you complete your keywords research is the moment of verifying is the content of your website match with that keywords, for that, you need to check each page of your site and verify that the information that you bring is relevant to the user that search specific keyword or phrase.

The main goal in this process is to create content with quality that satisfied the search of the user, try to don’t focus to alter the content or structure or your page to get more visits, is more important to get the correct users that can be potential clients. The search engine algorithm is smart and if you try to improve your position on the result with content that has poor of quality then you can have a bad effect on the ranking of your site.

Building Links

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. This is important because if other sites have links to your website, help the search engine to see that your page have relevant content for the users. Each link is considered like a vote of confidence from one site to other.

Resolve Technical Issues
In this case, when we talk about technical issues we refer those thinks you can modify on your page that can help to rank better, this process is usually called On-site SEO that refers to optimizing both the content and HTML source code of a page.

There are many factors that can affect the way your website is shown to search engine, but here is a summary of the more important:

Uniquely valuable: the content of each page needs to be unique and don’t have duplicate content.
Provides phenomenal UX: the interface needs to be user-friendly.
Crawler/bot accessible: use the best practices to allow the search engine robots to crawl, index and rank your site.
Keyword-targeted: check that keywords match with the content of the page.
Built to be shared through social networks:
Multi-device ready: your site have to display well on all devices desktop, mobile, and tablets.

If you want to learn in more details about how to apply the SEO on your site, check this article: On-site SEO: https://goo.gl/MLLBEW.

The main idea here is that you need to be sure that your website is optimized for SEO in order to allow the search engines to understand it’s structure and more importantly, that understand easily what is about.