Mike Lopez

I’m Mike Lopez. I ⌨️ build software, 🎹 write and release songs, 🎤 lead worship, and 📣 share what I learn along the way. Expect code, music, faith, AI, and the occasional rabbit hole. Different hats, same person. Which one brought you here?

Automate repetitive tasks once the process is understood.

Identify the riskiest assumption before committing to a detailed plan.

A status update should make the next decision easier. A long list of activity doesn’t always do that.

Coach with questions when someone can discover the answer themselves.

One thing I like about open source: when the documentation leaves a question unanswered, you can read the implementation. Sometimes that settles it. Sometimes you discover why the docs were vague. 😅 What project taught you something by letting you look inside?

For a membership product, I'd include this in the payment test plan: Payment succeeds. Access doesn't. Can support trace the payment to the account and restore access safely? The happy path gets a demo. Recovery deserves one too.

PHP developers: what makes you extract repeated code into a shared function? The second copy? The third? Only when both need the same change? I lean toward waiting until the shared purpose is clear. Matching lines can be a coincidence.

Escape output for the context where it will appear.

You can hold a high standard and still be kind. Humiliating someone doesn’t make the standard clearer.

Ask whether a report changes any decisions before maintaining it indefinitely.

What’s one thing you appreciate about your church community?

Set an example of taking breaks and respecting time off.

Refactor in small steps that preserve observable behavior.

What’s one WordPress habit you wish you’d learned earlier?

Make handoffs explicit: what is ready, what remains, and who acts next.

What are you doing with newfound free time now that AI is speeding up your work?

My rule for AI coding: give it an acceptance condition you can actually check. “Fix login” leaves plenty of room for interpretation. “An expired session redirects to login, then returns the user to the requested page” gives you something to test.

WordPress plugin developers: when a bug only appears with another plugin active, what's your first check? Hook order, shared filters, JavaScript, something else? “Works when I deactivate yours” is where the investigation starts.

I built a small Lando wrapper because setting up WordPress for plugin development meant repeating the same steps. It creates the project files, starts services, and gets WP-CLI ready. Small chore, worth automating. mikelopez.com/blog/1472/

During conflict, summarize the other person’s position before responding.