Although WordPress fully supports Markdown via the JetPack plugin and Markdown supports code blocks there are occasions where the encoding gets thrown off on posting and has to be edited before making a post live.
Chris Aldrich linked to a piece on the WordPress.com support pages that details the [code] shortcode which, with a language parameter, preserves formatting and even adds syntax highlighting within posts and pages.
This is native to WordPress.com but a plugin is available for self-hosted blogs which I may start using.
Compare the two blocks below:
function make_post($post){
$post = [
'title' => $title,
'content' => $body,
'status' => $status,
'format' => $format,
];
return $post;
}

function make_post($post){
$post = [
'title' => $title,
'content' => $body,
'status' => $status,
'format' => $format,
];
return $post;
}

The first is the standard Markdown rendering (I had to correct the greater than symbols having been converted to &gt;) and the second uses the plugin.
Pretty cool!
In Drafts I can create an action that inserts the shortcode after prompting for the language I want and I'll look at creating an Alfred workflow to do the same thing.
(You’ll need to visit the actual post to see the difference as you won’t get the effect via RSS.)