Category Archives: Work

You Do Not Scale

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“Most developers are itching to be a part of their favorite projects. You do not scale, but by giving developers tools and getting out of their way, your project can. So please remember that when issues are reported on your open source project, you should not fix them. I hope this serves you well and would love to hear about your experiences and help any way I can.”
By Wesley Beary in “Less is More published Nov 27, 2011. Hat tip Jake Dahn.

A leader will always lead by being prepared to do the work themselves, but I’m really feeling what @geemus wrote.

It is in the ethos of the WordPress community, and the company, my former employer, Matt Mullenweg formed to support it. Here is my favorite part of the Automattic Creed:

“I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.”

I’m excited by the help I’m receiving from my new colleagues at Piston Cloud and the OpenStack community.

Pistoneers are kindred spirits of Automatticians. Before joining the Piston Cloud team I noted automation being a regular theme on “Our Team“.

Ma.tt: not a robot

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Even after working for Matt Mullenweg for over four years now (my longest job!), it still totally pumps me up how forward thinking, thoughtful, and human Matt is.

From the ThemeShaper article “Premium Themes on WP.com, the backstory“:

“…it became obvious to me that we had to figure out the GPL issues first so introducing a WP.com marketplace wouldn’t inadvertently harm the WordPress community by sucking the air out of .org theme development, so I held off the revenue and success we knew this would bring to work out the GPL issues out with the community.

…

But very explicitly this is an experiment. We’re not psychic and there are many open questions: Will anyone buy these things? How will the private forums work for support, both for our users and partners? How long does it take us to review and get a new theme online? What’s the most effective price ranges? How many themes and partners should we have? How do we promote the premium themes, while balancing adding new free ones? Will any of them ever be more popular than the Smoothie? (51,109 blogs and counting.)

Go read the full article.

Could WordPress have a better BDFL?

WordPress Activate Theme Action

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There isn’t yet a WordPress activate theme hook. In the last week, it’s come up twice where WordPress.com Hosting VIP partners wanted some code to run once on theme activation.

It’s not an unusual scenario for our customers to create a new version of a theme, install it separately, and then activate it. Often this also allows reverting to the old version of the theme if something unexpected happens at launch.

In this scenario, it’s often easy to check for the existence of a new option, migrated, or other seed data, but sometimes you want to do something like:

global $pagenow;
if ( is_admin() && 'themes.php' == $pagenow && isset( $_GET['activated'] ) ) {
     // When theme is activated this code runs.
     // Still be defensive if you need to be, and check if
     // your baby is already born
}

Hat tip Frank Bültge.

Tuners Use zsh & iTerm

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One of the tools that I haven’t had much success really tuning before, which I’m looking to try again is Apple Terminal.

Mac OS X has been with us since 2001. There is now a lot of stale information out there for tuning the command line experience. For example, there are still a lot of articles about tsch in search results. The earlier versions of Mac OS X default shell was tsch, but since 2003 the shell has been bash.

One thing I’ve noticed in the screenshots of tuned Terminal is “zsh” in the window’s title bar. I’m not willing to tackle figuring out the zsh shell, but I find it interesting that it’s a favorite of the tuners.

Another favorite seems to be using iTerm. I noticed my co-worker Demitrious Kelly sporting iTerm in his WATCHME for wpshell. And today, reading my co-worker Andy Skelton’s “My SSH config setup” fellow WordPress contributor Dougal Campbell and my co-worker Donncha O Caoimh both gave iTerm shout outs.

I wonder if Apple Terminal has mostly caught up to iTerm. It seems iTerm might still have some tab advantages.

Tune Your Tools

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Black and white photo of a hand tuning a guitar

"Tune it in 96/365" cc by-nc flickr user Crashmaster007

Although I love to try the latest software and gadget, I’ve most recently been spending more effort tuning my tools.

When time is family time it seems like a greater benefit to optimize where I can instead of always seeking the next great thing!

It’s also a lot more work than just playing with the shiny.

Barrytime

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This had nothing to do with our network providers, or data centers…
Matt Mullenweg, “Downtime“, WordPress.com Blog, June 14th, 2010

Doesn’t mean that our Systems Lead Barry Abrahamson isn’t going to do everything he can to make sure a similar event never happens again.

Barry is solid, and makes every link around him stronger.

I love working with that guy!

Online Productivity Expensive?

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With a young family I’ve found myself drawn to calendaring and to using “to do” lists extensively. It has freed my time and energy to instead enjoy it with my wife and son.

I’ve turned my eye to doing some selective time tracking. This class of software is most often integrated into billing applications.

I’m looking at a few Mac apps:

And a couple of web services:

The spread in pricing of the web services surprised me. How does FreshBooks justify being so much more expensive?

Those prices are a year’s worth at the “solo” levels of these services. Except toggl, these web services are magnitudes more expensive than the Mac applications.

Time.com Hiring WordPress Developer

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Who says WordPress isn’t for the enterprise? for the Fortune 500? Not our long list of WordPress.com VIP Hosting customers obviously.

One of those customers, Time.com, is looking for a “Senior Front End WordPress Developer“.

*4+ years of PHP + MySQL development experience
*Experience with WordPress development, themes, plugins and other customizations
*Front-end markup experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript
*Strong core PHP development experience
*Ability to work with and modify existing code
*Ability to develop applications from scratch
*Ability to work successfully in a team environment
*Ability to understand and work with people in a creative environment
*Strong attention to detail
*Ability to read and integrate third party API’s

Bonus is you’ll get to regularly collaborate with my team.

Measurements That Matter on WordPress.com

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I know what measurements matter for WordPress.com, because they’re right there on the front page. Right now in the top left of “Freshly Pressed” it reads:

The best of 252,029 bloggers, 223,676 new posts, 327,799 comments, & 54,240,782 words today on WordPress.com.

Those numbers get me far more excited than page views and other “monetization” stats, because these right now front page stats reminds me blogging works.

These stats are about people expressing themselves (writing words) and connecting with other people (commenting).

These are the numbers I look to when I need inspiration.

Three’s Company

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“Yourself, plus two others. With only two, each person needs to be aware of all the details in case the other person needs to take a break / gets run over by a bus / whatever. With three, the load is spread a bit more easily.”

Boris Mann, thoughts on Passion and Frustration, October 5th, 2009

Three lemurs eating by Tambako the Jaguar. CC by-nd. Flickr Hosted.

"Three lemurs eating" by Tambako the Jaguar. CC by-nd. Flickr Hosted.

From starting a company with Boris and Co’s Bootup Labs to being the area experts for your company, you want three of you.

3 is a magic number.

I’ve always just gone with having one backup, but reflecting on it now, I should have two backups in each area.

At first it seems like an incredible amount of redundancy, but someone’s own focuses and work doesn’t go away when they have to fill in for you. You need two backups, two people who can step in to carry your load — each carrying some of your load.

This extends beyond backing you up. This creates a mesh of collaboration,. Having different collaborators (back ups) in different areas leaves no weak links.

Disagreeing about something with your backup? With three there is always a moderator / negotiator / tie breaker.