After over fifteen years as a faithful travel companion, I’m retiring my beloved 28L Patagonia Refugio backpack. The shoulder strap started tearing off and I’m too embarrassed to take it to the dry cleaner for another repair.

The 20L Evergoods Civic Travel Bag is its replacement. Interestingly, it seems to have a very similar functional volume to the Patagonia bag. I am extremely confused about how backpack manufacturers measure the volume of their backpacks.

I settled upon the Civic Travel Bag after a couple months of research, and a failed purchase of the Aer Travel Pack 3 Small. My key criteria:

• Form factor. It could be no larger than the Patagonia backpack. I use this backpack as my personal bag during travel and it has to fit under the seat in front of me. As I discovered with the Aer bag, inches matter.
• Dedicated laptop access. I didn’t want to spill everything out of the main compartment when I wanted to get my iPad or laptop out.
• Small top compartment. Dedicated access to a smaller compartment for my AirPods, passport, etc.
• Professional setting-friendly. I also need to use the bag as my daily bag to meetings during work travel.
• Holds a 32 oz water bottle. Staying hydrated during long-haul flights is one of my jet lag prevention tricks. My Patagonia bag was flexible enough to fit a 32 oz Nalgene in its main compartment. While this isn’t quite true for the Evergoods, I found a narrow 32 oz bottle that fits in its exterior water bottle pocket.

AI was helpful-ish in my search. I think I came across the Evergoods brand thanks to Gemini. However, it also provided a lot of suggestions that didn’t really meet my criteria so I still did plenty of manual digging. The OneBag community on Reddit helped me the most, especially their crowdsourced spreadsheet which was invaluable for considering a range of options.

My one hesitation about the Evergoods bag: it is much stiffer than my Patagonia backpack. I think it will be fine in the long term but it’s made me realize how I much appreciated my Patagonia’s soft duffel-like nature.

A final note on the Aer Travel Pack 3 Small: it’s too big as a personal item. Obvious in hindsight, but not obvious if you’re shopping based on volume. I loaded it up for a recent trip, gave it one last look before going to the airport, and rightfully got cold feet as I realized I wasn’t going to get it past the gate agent. Nor was it going to give me any space at my feet.

On December 26th, Leah, Ava, Charlie, and I cleaned up all of our Christmas decorations and then flew out to eat for twelve days in Hanoi, Bai Tu Long Bay, Can Tho, and Saigon. We never had a bad meal: bánh mì, bun cha, chả cá, nem nướng, copious amounts of seafood, and even really decent Mexican on our last night. Everything is fresh in Vietnam, and you notice it in the food.

Other trip highlights include:

• Hanoi:
  • Shopping lots of brand name apparel at surprising discounts (Ava)
  • Walking around Hoan Kiem Lake, which apparently becomes quite the scene as Tet approaches (Leah, Daniel)
• Bai Tu Long Bay:
  • Seeing the majestic nature of the limestone rock formations from the sun deck of the Dragon Legend 2 (Leah, Daniel)
  • Everything about the Indochina Junk cruise (Charlie)
  • BBQ lunch on the beach, and then getting to swim in the ocean (Ava)
• Can Tho:
  • Eating dinner at Nem Nướng Thanh Vân — so good, we went twice (Leah)
  • Running with the hotel staff run club at Victoria Can Tho (Daniel, Leah)
  • Touring Mười Cương Cacao Farm with the owner, Mr. Bean, as our guide (Daniel)
  • Pool time (Ava, Charlie)
• Saigon:
  • Touring the Ben Thanh market and taking a Vietnamese cooking class (Ava, Charlie, Leah, Daniel)
  • Not the War Remnants Museum (Charlie)
  • Waiting out the downpour on our last full day, and then getting soaked when we gave up and ran for it (Daniel)

I think Leah and I pride ourselves on being somewhat “off the beaten path” travelers. In the case of Vietnam, I was perfectly fine to stay on the tourist track. The tourist-specific areas we stayed in and the organized activities we did were delightful ways to experience the country. Additionally, so many people visit the country that it feels like it would be inappropriate to journey off trail.

But, there is one way visiting Vietnam was extremely uncomfortable: the shame of being an American. The violence we perpetrated on the country is very difficult to see, and even more unfathomable is how kind and generous its people still are. I was especially touched by how eager Mr. Bean was to tell me of the places he visited in the US while training for his two year stint as a South Vietnamese army helicopter pilot.

Lastly, if you do think socialism or communism are great political systems to aspire to, I’d encourage you to organize a protest in Vietnam and let me know how it goes. There’s a reason there’s very little crime in the country.

I took a lot of photos with my iPhone, but I like the few I took with my Nikon Zf the best.

Other people read books about storytelling. Spoiler alert! Here are my notes on everything I found interesting in The Science of Storytelling.

• Many stories begin with unexpected change and then continue with that. Change is endlessly fascinating to brains.
• Storytellers create moments of unexpected change that sees the attention of their protagonist and, by extension, their readers.
  • Moments of unexpected change can create curiosity, for example, “where’s papa going with that ax?“
  • The unsaid threat of change can be just as effective.
• The more context we learn about a mystery, the more anxious we become to solve it.
• The place of maximum curiosity is when people think they have some idea about the dramatic question, but aren’t quite sure.
• We experience the stories we read by building hallucinated models of them in our head.
• Transative and active sentence construction make the scene more realistic because they make it easier for our brains to visualize, e.g. “Sarah opened the door” instead of “the door was opened.”
• Don’t say something was “delightful”; say it in such a way that the reader thinks “that was delightful“ after reading it.
• We are wired to be fascinated by others and get valuable information from their faces.
• Our ability to develop a “theory of mind” enables us to imagine what others are thinking, feeling, and plotting, even when they’re not present. But, we tend to dramatically overestimate our ability to understand others. Our errors about what others are thinking are major cause of human drama.
• Cause and effect is a fundamental way that brains understand the world. “Bananas.” “Vomit.”” Your mind automatically forms an association between the two.
• Cause and effect are ambiguous in high literature to give the reader more to ponder and decode. However, they’re much more literal in commercials for mass appeal.
• The gaps in explanation are all of the places where the audience inserts themselves. Good stories meld the reader’s world with the story’s world.
• Characters are interesting because of their flaws.
• “Naïve realism” is where you see your reality as true and everyone else’s perception of reality as flawed
• When designing a character it’s helpful to think of them from the perspective of their theory of control. How do they handle the unexpected? The theory of control is often challenged at the story start.
• Personality is measured on five spectrums: neuroticism, extra version, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Men tend to be more disagreeable and less neurotic than women.
• Personality is significantly heritable.
• Our habit of leaving details in our environment is why journalist prefer to interview people at home.
• Western culture has a three part story arc: crisis, struggle, resolution. Stems from Aristotle in ancient Greece.
• in Asia, a story typically involves a character who makes a grand sacrifice for everyone else. There’s typically no ending and you have to find the answer for yourself.
• Stories are lessons in control.
• We react to foreign ideas with the same fight or flight response we might use for a physical attack. The beliefs we fight to defend are those that we’ve centered our identity, values, and theory of control around.
• Good stories have an ignition point, the first step in the cause and effect series.
• Our sense of moral superiority is one of the strongest hallucinations our mind imposes upon us. Our mind craftily rewrites the past to center us as the hero in the story. Our sense of who we are is heavily dependent on our memories, and our memories aren’t to be trusted.
• Our brains also confabulate or invent lies to explain our behavior, lies that are perfectly believable.
• We ourselves aren’t just one person. Multiplicity is all of the characters that we hold within ourselves competing for control of how we act. These are expressed as anger, depression, rage, happiness.
• Characters tend to have both conscious and subconscious desires, often contradicting one another.
• We’ve spent more than 95% of our time on Earth existing in tribes, and much of the neural architecture we still carry around today evolved when we were doing so. For example, people still prefer to sleep as far from their bedroom door as possible and with a clear view of it.
• Most gossip is about moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group.
• “A common feature of our hero-making cognition seems to be that we all tend to feel like this – relatively low in status and yet actually, perhaps secretly, possessing the skills and character of someone deserving of a great deal more.”
• Hubris is when unsound claims are made to status. Status is always earned. Humiliation is the removal of any ability to claim status.
• “Goal-direction is the foundational mechanism on top of which all our other urges are built. The basic Darwinian aim of all life forms is to survive and reproduce. Because of the peculiarities of our evolutionary history, human strategies to attain these goals centre on achieving connection with tribes, and on status within them. On top of these deep universals sits everything else we desire. […] What we see and feel, at any given moment, depends on what we’re trying to get – when we’re caught in the street in a downpour, we don’t see shops and trees and doorways and awnings, we see places of shelter.”
• Multiplayer video games are so popular because they feed three important cravings: connection, status, and a goal to pursue.
• “The fundamental human value is the struggle towards a meaningful goal.”
• When all of the good is on your side and all of the bad is on theirs, that’s your storytelling brain running in full.
• The job of the plot is to plot against the protagonist. The hostile and alien environment will test their theory of control again and again. All along, the character can change, the character’s goal can change, the reader’s understanding of the character can change, etc.
• A gripping plot keeps asking the dramatic question, or the big, central question that drives suspense (e.g. “will they or won’t they catch the murderer?”)
• The five act plot structure is equivalent to the 3.5 minute pop song.
• One common story shape: ‘Things get worse and worse until, at the last minute, they get better.’

Sometimes you need to put a fork in the electrical socket. Please don’t, though. It’s a metaphor.

I’ve eaten a lot of humble pie over the last 18 months. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way.

People and vision matter more than process

While I was on winter break in December 2023, Matt pinged me and asked, “Would you be interested in running WordPress.com while I’m on sabbatical?” My initial reaction was “no, not really, it seems like a lot of work”, but YOLO was my MO at the time so I said yes.

“Drinking from a fire hose” is a certain form of drowning. Running WordPress.com was like drinking from the entire water main. I went from engineering team lead to being responsible for product development, marketing, customer success, etc. It was a unique learning experience, to say the least.

My guiding hypothesis was that we needed to implement some modern management practices to make the organization more effective. I love EOS, so I adapted some of its systems to Automattic’s culture. Unfortunately, I was wrong in the ways that matter most.

All problems are people problems, and you can’t reorg or delegate your way to solving them. I reorg’d the business twice during my 10 month tenure: once when I started in January, and a second time in May when I was dissatisfied with my first iteration. I thought the effectiveness problem was organizational alignment, but it turned out to be human performance.

Leading with vision requires picking the right challenge, then seeing if you can be even more ambitious. With the humility of hindsight, I oriented the organization towards where the puck was (WordPress hosting), instead of where the puck was going (AI-assisted website building). I needed to take a much bigger swing to have a material impact on the business.

Ultimately, though, my downfall was that I failed to thrive at the executive level. I did a poor job of building relationships and collaborating effectively with my peers. And when my leadership competency came under attack, I took stock of my energy, evaluated my priorities, and decided to move on.

Don’t take a rebound job

Because I get really uncomfortable when I’m not working, I immediately went on an aggressive job search and ended up at PostHog.

I both loved and hated those six months. I loved it because PostHog has a bunch of really talented people (an obvious example of “talent compounds”) and I learned a ton. I hated it because building B2B software wasn’t what I wanted to be doing and my sleep issues got a lot worse.

On the learning front:

• I went 0 to 1 on writing production Python in about four weeks. Thank you, Cursor.
• I realized how little I knew about SQL and substantially leveled up my knowledge. Thank you, Mastering Postgres.
• I knew nothing about applied statistics and learned enough to be successful on the experimentation team. Thank you, blood, sweat, and tears.

Importantly, the experience made me realize how much I enjoy learning, and that my knowledge had stagnated over the last decade.

But, it was the job I could do, not the job I wanted to do. My insomnia got worse, so I eventually left. In hindsight, I realize I should’ve taken the time to decompress, reflect, and wait for the right opportunity.

Treat the job search like a competition

After PostHog, I thought I would spend the next several months watching the AI revolution unfold. I learned again, and finally internalized, that I really don’t do well sitting idle. This time, however, I was a lot more deliberate about my search.

The job market is really tough right now. With many companies mandating a return to office and a few years of progressive layoffs, there is a ton of competition for remote jobs. Additionally, those living in the U.S. are competing with international talent that is a lot cheaper.

As a candidate, it’s easy to feel that your challenge in finding a job is a reflection of your inherent self-worth. The reality is that there are many, many factors outside of your control. Even so, it’s worth doing the best that you can with the factors you can control.

Speaking as someone who is involved in the hiring process again:

• Invest the time into creating a really great resume. So many resumes are poorly formatted, way too long, and stuffed with a bunch of keywords. It makes it really difficult to understand a candidate. Create a resume that’s concise, notable, and highlights your unique accomplishments. You might think brevity will unnecessarily pigeonhole you, but your sole goal is to stand out and make it into the interview process.
• Write a cover letter that explains how your resume and experience are relevant to the organization and job description. Submitting a great cover letter will, again, make you stand out amongst the other candidates who either didn’t submit a cover letter or wrote a poor one. Your cover letter and resume should be examples of the work product you’ll produce.
• Consider a structured search process like Never Search Alone. In particular, I found it really valuable to do Reverse Exit Interviews. They are 15 minute conversations with former colleagues, asking: “What did I do well?”, “What could I have done better?”, and “If you were in my shoes, how would you approach this job search?” The interviews gave me great insights about how others perceived me at work. I also found a lot of value in sending monthly updates to the people I had chatted with. The updates made me realize that I had accomplished something each month, and the replies of support bolstered my confidence.

In July, I started at New_ Public as the Open Source Developer for the Public Spaces Incubator. I really enjoy the people I work with, believe in our mission, and find the work rewarding. The past 18 months have taught me a lot: how to write a cover letter that stands out, why patience matters, and what it takes to be an effective leader. The lesson through all of it, though, is this: do the hard thing and survive long enough to get lucky.

I had little expectations and I’m genuinely surprised by how much I enjoy this device.

To set some context: I’ve had pretty bad insomnia over the last year. Both the “wake up at midnight and can’t fall back asleep” and “wake up at 2 am and can’t fall back asleep” kinds. Meds get me back to sleep, but they also make me groggy during the day, so I’ve been desparate to figure out a solution.

One recent realization is that maybe I shouldn’t blast my eyes with blue light first thing in the morning. For about a decade, I’ve been waking up at 4 am and starting my work day by immediately jumping on the computer. I then get increasingly short-changed on sleep as the week progresses, and end up exhausted on Friday.

Enter the Boox Go 7, an Android device with e-ink display that retails for $250. I was stuck between “I want to delay my blue light exposure” and “I want to be able to read and write when I wake up”, and it solves my needs… perfectly?

First of all, it kinda works exactly how I want it to. Because it runs Android, I can install the apps I want from the Google Play Store: Instapaper, Simplenote, etc. In fact, I even found an RSS reader, Capy Reader, that seems to be a good clone of my favorite iOS RSS reader, Reeder. Each of the apps work well-enough, albeit with minor quirks. For example, I’m typing this into Simplenote with a Bluetooth keyboard. The app is responsive and screen refresh rate sufficient.

This brings me to a subtle point: I actually think the device has ample power under the hood. When I think “e-ink device”, my stereotype is “underpowered device.” I think it’s actually “quite a powerful computer hiding behind an e-ink display.”

The combination of these two makes the Boox Go 7 a surprisingly delightful device. Computing on an e-ink display is a lot calmer than a full color display. I’m able to read and sit and think without getting pulled into a dopamine slot machine. I originally thought the screen might be too narrow, but the horizontal device orientation (buttons on the bottom) is a great screen width for text.

The downsides of the device are simply a collection of quirks. For example, Instapaper has a pagination feature that works well with the hardware buttons. Capy Reader, on the other hand, only supports scrolling with the hardware buttons and scrolling on an e-ink display isn’t particularly smooth. As another example, for whatever reason, CMD + Shift + arrow key doesn’t select an entire line of text in Simplenote. I’m not sure if that’s an app thing or an OS thing.

But I can live with the quirks because the Boox Go 7 brings me joy in many ways. If I was writing on a laptop, I would’ve already been distracted by now. However, on this pleasant screen with a CPU and memory, I’m able to sit and write for a full 60 minutes. The Boox Go 7 is unexpectedly awesome.

To close the loop on the insomnia: this week (knock wood) is my first great sleep week in many. In addition to delaying when I jump on the computer, I’ve also stopped wearing my watch at night (to track my sleep) and started going to bed later (9 pm instead of 8 pm) to build up more sleep drive. Life’s a lot better on a good night’s sleep!

I love “shaping” so much that David Calhoun and I ran an entire “Better Project Planning in 90 Minutes” workshop on it at the Dotcom Division Meetup in November 2023, and then an encore virtual workshop in December 2023. We presented these six concepts:

• Clarify the opportunity. Do not proceed to identifying the solution until everyone feels they fully understand the problem to be solved. Make sure the opportunity statement addresses these questions:
  • What is the problem or need to be solved?
  • Who experiences it, how frequently, and what’s their current workaround?
  • How does the competition solve it?
  • What makes it important, urgent, or valuable to solve right now?
• Appetites, not estimates. Estimates start with a design and end up with an (always incorrect) number. Appetites start with a number and end up with a design. Two key benefits include:
  • It creates space for the product team to cut scope along the way (as needed) in order to get something shipped.
  • It enables comparing potential projects apples to apples in the “betting” stage. If they have comparable cost (time), then the benefits can be more directly compared.
• Rough, bounded, and solved. Prepare the least amount of definition for your project. It will feel uncomfortable, but it will enable the product team to operate more effectively by applying their professional judgement while they work.
• Breadboards and fat marker sketches. Again, prepare the least amount of visual fidelity for the project plan. Designers often feel uncomfortable with this, but Jeff Golenski reports this “effectively reduced [the Automattic for Agencies] design iteration phases from ~3 down to 1”.
• Rabbit holes and no-gos. Fully explore the rabbit holes to identify the solution, and clearly identify what you aren’t doing as no-gos. The former increases your confidence in execution, and the latter makes stakeholder management much easier (“it’s ok that some things aren’t in scope”).
• Uphill slope and downhill slope. This is a useful communication tactic for identifying the current stage of the project. If you’re on the uphill slope, you’re still uncovering uncertainties. If you’re on the downhill slope, everything that’s remaining is known and you’re 90% confident in delivering the project on time, within scope, and meeting or exceeding expectations of quality. You should transition from the uphill slope to the downhill slope within the first two to three weeks of the project, otherwise it will likely blow past its appetite.

Importantly, you can take these as a “choose your own adventure.” Adopt them piecemeal based on whatever pain you’re experiencing, or simply use the language to influence your existing process.

Super grateful to the folks at Automattic for giving me a copy of the slides so I could share them with my new team at New_ Public.

For example:

• Portland to Coeur d’Alene should’ve taken six hours, but we detoured through Walla Walla to get burritos with Andrew and Charlotte.
• Coeur d’Alene to Yellowstone should’ve taken seven hours, but we stumbled upon a really cool Old Montana State Prison we had to check out.
• Yellowstone to Billings managed to take the expected three and a half hours.
• Billings to Mt. Rushmore should’ve taken five and a half hours, but Ava and Charlie were having too much fun in the hotel pool.

Thankfully, we had a few great audio books (Space Case was our favorite) and an endless supply of Extra Watermelon gum.

Ava’s trip highlights:

1. Mt. Rushmore
2. Jewel Cave Historic Lantern Tour
3. Grand Geyser
4. Presidential Wax Museum in Keystone
5. Jamaican food in Rapid City, South Dakota

Charlie’s trip highlights:

1. Hiking to Lone Star Geyser
2. Mt. Rushmore
3. Grand Geyser
4. Jewel Cave
5. Earning Junior Ranger badges

My trip highlight: countless hours exploring with my kids.

If you need inspiration for your next pizza party, here are the topping combos we enjoyed, ordered by my current preference:

• Tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, sausage, ricotta (borrowed from L’Industrie)
• Tomato sauce, mozzarella, roasted garlic, pepperoni, pepperoncini (borrowed from Marzano’s)
• Grilled onions, walnuts, gorgonzola (my OG recipe, borrowed from Kate Ray)
• Pesto, mozzarella, prosciutto, dates, goat cheese, arugula (borrowed from my brother-in-law)
• Tomato sauce, mozzarella, green apple, bacon, red onion, gorgonzola (source unknown)
• BBQ sauce, red onions, corn, bell peppers, mozzarella, jalapeños (One of ChatGPT’s answers to “good vegetarian pizza toppings”)

All in all, I prepared and cooked 18 pizzas in ~90 minutes on my Ooni Koda 16. Counter-intuitively, many guests learned that the best way they could help was simply to clear the path between the kitchen counter and the oven. Maintaining my flow state is a key ingredient to the final product.

Some initial first impressions:

• It was pretty easy to import my OPML file into Pocket Casts to migrate all of my podcast subscriptions. Overcast lost the OPML export button in the redesign, but I was able to download it from the website.

• Using Pocket Casts feels a little bit more like programming a control panel. There are a ton more settings and concepts. For example, there are both folders and filters. I’m not sure why I would use one vs. the other. I tried to create a “Pinned” folder to recreate Overcast’s pinning feature, but it just put the podcasts in a folder that got lost on my screen.

• I’m not sure how Pocket Cast’s audio engine stacks up against Overcast. Time to take a walk and test that out.

You might ask, “but Daniel, don’t you work for Automattic? Why haven’t you been using Pocket Casts all along?”

I actually did try to make the switch before. I ran into some buggy behavior with the CarPlay integration, and couldn’t adjust to the overall UX complexity.

Between then and now, Overcast became more difficult to use, and regularly fills up my device storage because auto-delete seems to be broken. Time to make a switch!

First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong? I wrote about this in more detail in last year’s letter.

Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.

2016 Letter to Shareholders

I find the concept to be particularly helpful in software development. When shaping a project, my goal is to get to 70% confident on these criteria:

• The proposed solution squarely addresses the opportunity.
• We can complete the project within the stated appetite.
• We will be able to meet or exceed expectations of quality.

I use the concept actively, too. Here’s an example dialogue with a teammate:

Me: What’s your current level of confidence with the proposed project?

Teammate: Oh, maybe 50%.

Me: What additional information would get you to 70% confident?

Teammate: Well, I’m still uncertain about X and Y.

Me: Ok, let’s explore those further.

Applied to software development, “70% confident” is both subjective and objective:

• Subjective because humans ultimately evaluate the project against the criteria (e.g. “did this project meet or exceed our expectations of quality?” is squishy).
• Objective because you should hit the target seven times out of ten (three times out of ten is not 70%).

“70% confident” is a useful communication tool for finding the sweet spot between not enough planning and analysis paralysis.

Being in charge is a lot of work! Fortunately, my leadership team is growing stronger by the day, and we have clear metrics and objectives in place. Here are two aspects of the role I’m discovering quite viscerally:

1. It’s a performance. The clothing I wear, what’s in my background, and my audio quality all have an impact on how people perceive me. As much as I love it, my TuHS Boys Tennis sweatshirt from 2005 is no longer work-appropriate.

2. I need to bring my “A” game every hour of every day. Is there any downtime? Only when I force myself to take downtime.

Speaking of, Leah and the kids are headed up to the mountain right now without me. In a funny twist of fate, February also marks the month Leah has her rural rotation in Coos Bay. I was in “solo dad mode” all week so, as much as it pains me to miss skiing, I’m taking a “me day” to reset.

Time for some soccer!

My leadership style emulates how I think about soccer. A soccer match has a team, a ball, and one goal. Every person has a position to play, but they must also pass and be aware of the entire field. They will only win if they play together as a team. So, when leading, my mind is always asking: how can I improve the performance of the team?

Ted Lasso is the greatest show I’ve ever seen. Aside from it, here are some books that have influenced how I lead (and when I read them):

• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (January 2022). I can’t do everything and can’t know everything. In order to have a high-performing team, I need them to come to me with “I intend to”, not “what should I do?”

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (January 2022). They are: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. If you’re on a team, reading parts of this will be like looking in the mirror.

• The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You (November 2022). Chock-full of practical tips drawing from a number of classics. Here are my 43 highlights.

• High Output Management (September 2022). One of the classics indicated above. Two key ideas: 1) performance is a function of training and motivation, 2) a manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence. Everything is a production line, whether you like it or not.

• Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win (August 2017). I always enjoy war stories. As someone who has the tendency to micromanage, “extreme ownership” was my first “aha” moment about the importance of delegation.

• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High (December 2016). Start with heart!

I’ll close with this distinction between leadership and management from my current read, Scaling People:

Great leaders put forth a vision and set lofty goals that inspire others to forge ahead, even when the path isn’t always clear. The clarity of their vision keeps everyone focused on the big picture and sustains participation and motivation. Leaders don’t have to be managers, but if they aren’t, they need to know how to work with and hire managers to build the right teams to execute that vision. It often feels like leaders are asking for just a bit too much, but in the end, that’s what provides motivation.

Great managers run teams that do the actual building. Management is all about human-centric execution. Great managers know how to define goals and set operational cadences, all while helping each report have a clear view of their current performance and future career aspirations. Teams with great managers have a high level of trust, experience the challenge and reward of hard work, and feel like they’re making progress both as individuals and as a team.

Hope you find some of these as impactful as I have!

Happy birthday, Matt! Thank you for your dedication to WordPress over the years. It has enabled my entire career, allowed me to raise a family I love, and connected me to people all around the globe.

WordPress helped Andrew Witherspoon and I launch a website for the Whitman Pioneer:

… In the meantime, though, why don’t you check out the Whitman Pioneer? It’s a project I’m working on actively, and I would love any feedback you can give me!

Yo yo yo, I have a site

Spittle eventually took that over.

I was apparently really into open source right away, too:

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of articles on applying the concept of “open-source” to a non-profit organization. 

A month or so ago, I was hit with the notion that the open-source movement might be applicable to systems beyond software…

Components of an open-source organization: Part one

A year later, I thought WordPress would be a great fit for the Daily Emerald:

…While I recognize there are already many content management systems on the market, my paradoxical goal is for a platform as easy to use and install as WordPress, which also offers advanced management features…

One case against College Publisher

And so the story goes.

In any case, I hope you have a great birthday and an excellent year ahead of you. 😊 Thanks for everything you’ve helped make possible!

Highlights

It’s hard to pick highlights from the year when the entire year was a highlight. My kids are the perfect age, and we make the most of every day.

Leah and I organized a Newspaper Club at Bridgeport this fall. Over several Wednesday afternoons, the kids learned how to interview, write an inverted pyramid, and draw comics. A local journalist even visited! At the end, we published their best work in a four page edition of The Barking Bulldog.

Leah and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary in September with a three night stay at Minam River Lodge. The lodge is one of the four remaining private properties in the Eagle Cap Wilderness and is only accessible by foot, horse, or small aircraft. The food is even more amazing than the location. First, imagine a nice, four-course meal in Portland. Next, imagine having such a meal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three days straight. My favorite was the carrot gnocchi with brown butter sauce, toasted sage, and chanterelles.

In October, we visited Taos for a long weekend to celebrate Will and Ariel’s wedding. It was a super fun opportunity to connect with old friends. The kids hiked to 11,040 feet! We had a great time exploring the town, and soaking in our hot tub under the vast, dark night.

Charlie and Ava both had great spring and fall soccer seasons. Coaching them is always a joy. One favorite moment: in the last couple minutes of Charlie’s final game, I said “go score a goal” and he quickly went on to nail an impossible shot.

I flew through Heathrow several times for work this year. My reward for completing the red-eye was sushi from Itsu — always a fun treat. I sent a picture each time to make sure Leah, Ava, and Charlie knew I was eating sushi.

Skiing was fantastic last winter. I made it up to the mountain for multiple deep powder days (my friend Jordan pictured on the top left). We also had a great time taking the ski bus as a family, and Ava did her first black diamond (twice!).

Quantified Self

According to Goodreads, I’ve read 29 books so far this year. This is the second year I didn’t hit my goal of 35, so I think I’ll drop it to 30 next year. My favorites were:

• Elon Musk. It’s funny to me how some people have such strong opinions about Elon. He’s just a human like the rest of us! But his production function is amazing and, while I don’t aspire to it, I am inspired by it.

• Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. We are very lucky there haven’t been any accidental nuclear explosions (knock wood).

• Damascus Station. A pretty darn fun spy thriller.

My running is way down this year but my soccer is way up! According to Strava, I ran 366.8 miles in 65 runs (average of 5.64 miles per run), played soccer 48 times for a total of 50 hours, and swam 79 times for a total of 50 hours. I also lifted a couple days a week. I’m pretty fortunate to be able to work out seven days a week.

According to TripIt, I traveled 53,908 miles in 56 days on 9 trips. The destinations included NYC, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Costa Rica, Barcelona, Alaska, Washington, D.C., Taos, and Munich. Working with a European team has meant a fair bit of international travel.

2024

The biggest thing coming up in 2024: Leah’s graduation from NP school (knock wood!). We’re super proud of her ability to balance life and school, and looking forward to seeing where she takes her career.

Aside from that, I’m excited to try out Nodoguro in January, survive solo dad mode in February, and take the kids on a longer backpacking trip in the summer.

YOLO!

I’ve always been curious as to why we go over budget. “Overspending” is an obvious answer, but not particularly helpful. Has food gotten more expensive over time? Do we have certain indulgences that are major contributors? Is $1400/month simply a fantasy?

Additionally, with the tech industry where it’s at, the specter of layoffs is never far away. If I were to get laid off again, our “war budget” cuts us down to $1000/month for groceries.

Grocery store spending by month

To start exploring, I exported this year’s Grocery transactions to CSV, uploaded them to Google Sheets, and produced this breakdown:

Ok, May definitely seems to be the outlier. It looks like a wild month at New Seasons drove it up a couple hundred more than normal. Generally, when we go over budget, it seems like we overspend by $150-$250.

Marginally helpful, but not yet actionable. One thing I do know is that New Seasons tends to be 50% more expensive than Fred Meyer. If we switched exclusively to Fred Meyer, we could save $70/month right there (30% of $200/month average spending).

April and October spending per category

Because I’ve been curious about our grocery spending for a while, I’ve saved most of my Costco receipts over the last year. I also have access to most Fred Meyer receipts from their website. I collected them to a folder and used ChatGPT to parse April’s and October’s:

Parse the receipt into a CSV with these columns: date (YYYY-MM-DD), store, item name, item size, item code (number), number of units, price per unit, total amount for the item, and category. Please include the full receipt data set in the CSV.

Putting this receipt data into Google Sheets produced this summary:

Before analyzing, it’s worth highlighting a couple limitations:

1. The data doesn’t represent 100% of the month’s overall spending, nor does it represent 100% of spending at each store. I was missing some receipts, and I also didn’t validate ChatGPT’s parsing.

2. We tend to buy in bulk, so I’d really need several months of data to know what our true monthly spend was for a given category. As a simple example, a Costco bag of flour lasts 2-3 months.

With those caveats applied, here’s what stands out:

• We buy Kerrigold (the most expensive) butter at Costco. We could probably save $20/month by choosing the low cost alternative.

• We spend roughly $200/month on fruits and vegetables. Because they have a short shelf life, I imagine we waste $60/month of that. We could save there, but it would require a fair amount of conscious thought.

• We don’t buy super fancy meat, but we could probably save $30/month by eating less of it.

• I don’t normally buy health supplements out of the grocery budget. In October, I bought some magnesium supplement and haven’t used it. $30 wasted right there.

• We spend a lot of money on snacks ($150/month average). We could probably cut that in half to $75/month. I’m not sure what the substitution would be, though.

• Seafood is a luxury that we could purchase when we explicitly have the budget for it.

The primary levers seem to be:

1. Is it a luxury or indulgence?

2. Is there a lower cost alternative?

3. How much are we wasting?

Definitely no silver bullet, though.

If we applied all of these constraints to October, we would’ve spent $1,252.99 instead of $1,577.99 ($325 savings). That’s under our $1400/month budget, but still a bit from our $1000/month “war budget”.

For Ava, ziplining was the highlight of the trip. She asked about it repeatedly until I realized I would have to produce the goods. In addition to ziplining, Charlie also enjoyed surfing (which was “nice and cool”). Leah managed to catch a wave in the first five minutes but it took me the entire 90 minute lesson. Food-wise, simple was the best: Leah and I ordered “comida tipica” once or twice a day (black beans, rice, chicken or steak, plantain, and a salad).

If you care to fork our itinerary, here’s what we did:

• Spent two nights at Arenal Observatory Lodge, one night at Camino Verde Bed & Breakfast in Monteverde (could’ve been two), and three nights at a fabulous Airbnb in Tamarindo (“tamagringo” is a correct nickname for the city).

• Had a lovely afternoon at Eco Termales Hot Springs near Arenal.

• Ziplined the Sky Adventures Sky Trek in Monteverde, and then did the Kinkajou Night Walk in the evening.

• Rafted Rio Corobici with RCR Rafting on the drive to Tamarindo and saw crocodiles, howler monkeys, bats, and a variety of birds.

• Caught some waves on our last full day with Avellanas Soul Surf School.

Overall, an A+ vacation, and we’re already looking forward to a week of surfing on our next visit.

In classic fashion, I broke trunk tests because I missed a test file: r55280.

I ran npm run grunt patch:https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/3796 but I guess the binary isn’t included.

Looking forward to helping with some bug fixing!

Earlier this week, the WSJ included my story in an article about noncompetes:

Daniel Bachhuber had worked as a software consultant for years when he decided to take an in-house job in the fall of 2018. His new employer required that he sign a one-year noncompete agreement, which he said was so broad it would have prevented him from practicing his core skills if he were to leave the company or be fired.

Mr. Bachhuber balked. Earlier in his career, he had been laid off a few weeks into a new job, just after his first child was born. If that happened at the new job, he recalled thinking, he would be unable to earn a living for a year. “I’m always thinking, worst case scenario, what kind of downstream protection do I have?” the 35-year-old said. “Even if I was employed just one day, I couldn’t go back to the same clients I had.”

It’s pretty cool to help shape public policy! The reporter and I connected after she came across public comment I left for the FTC back in January 2020.

I’m pretty sure I heard about the original request for comment from Marginal Revolution, so seeing MR link to the article really made my day:

These days, I optimize for making the most of every day. Did I squeeze the juice out of every moment?

My kids are the perfect age, which makes life seem even more precious and fleeting.

Highlights

As we walked up to Baby Beach in June, I saw a dad shouting to his family, “come check out the turtles!” He was standing waist deep in water about 30 feet offshore. I quickly helped Ava and Charlie get their snorkeling gear on, and we got to swim with them too.

Good thing my iPhone turned out to be waterproof!

In May, I rejoined Automattic as an engineer working on WordPress.com. It’s been an unexpectedly delightful experience, thanks in large part to the folks on the “Forge Bowling Group”.

Coaching Charlie’s soccer team this fall was a rewarding experience, as always. Part of the way through the season, I realized we could avoid a lot of goals if they didn’t have a turnover directly in front of their goal.

After that point, “to the outside!” was all the parents ever heard from me. But hey, it worked!

Quantified Self

According to Goodreads, I’ve read 31 books so far this year (not quite my goal of 35).

My favorites seemed to be business books. The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You is chock full of practical tidbits, including this one:

Here are some ways to tell if your team is executing well:

• Lists of projects or tasks are prioritized from most to least important, with the higher-up items receiving more time and attention.

• There is an efficient process for decision-making that everyone understands and trusts.

• The team moves quickly, especially with reversible decisions. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”

• After a decision is made, everyone commits (even those who disagree) and moves speedily to make it happen. Without new information, there is no second-guessing the decision, no pocket vetoing, and no foot dragging.

• When important new information surfaces, there is an expedient process to examine if and how current plans should change as a result.

• Every task has a who and a by when.

• Owners set and reliably deliver on commitments.

• The team is resilient and constantly seeking to learn. Every failure makes the team stronger because they don’t make the same mistake twice.

From High Output Management, my favorite idea is that everything relating to human performance boils down to either training or motivation. “Is this a training issue or a motivation issue?” is a hugely powerful lens.

Lastly, Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders is an enjoyable read to understand what the transformation to a highly-effective organization can look like.

According to Strava, I ran 612 miles in 101 runs (average of 6.06 miles per run). Compared to years prior, I am spend a lot less time running. My typical exercise week these days: lift, swim, run, lift, soccer, swim, run.

According to TripIt, I traveled 24,770 miles in 53 days on 11 trips. The destinations included Scottsdale, Chicago, Minneapolis, Alaska, Hawaii, San Diego, Boston, and Denver. I guess TripIt includes driving destinations too? That list doesn’t add up to 11.

2023

YOLO!

In that spirit, here are a few good things I can heartily recommend:

1. prAna Vaha shorts ($69 $40). More comfortable than sweatpants, and somewhat stylish to boot. Also on sale at REI.

2. Blue Lotus chai ($19). Spicy deliciousness. Pairs nicely with Oatly. Boost the sweetness with stevia to get pretty close to the real thing. I use a Breville milk frother ($160) to mix it all together.

3. Blundstone boots ($220). Boots that make you feel like you’re driving a truck instead of a car.

4. Audio-Technica ATH-M50x headphones ($149). Solid sound at a reasonably affordable price. Great for planes too, no noise cancellation necessary.

If you have no idea what to ask for (or give) this holiday season, hopefully this is a helpful list!

Someone on Twitter asked about what it’s like, so I thought I’d answer their questions in a blog post.

How did you get into tech?

My freshman year (2006) was a big turning point when I:

• Applied to six unpaid photojournalism internships and didn’t hear back from a single one.

• Applied to one paid web production internship (Grist) and was accepted.

My parents raised me to be pragmatic about work, “you’ll need to find a job that supports your expensive hobbies”, so this experience made it clear to me where the money was.

Even so, after my freshman summer with Grist, I:

• Started on my pilot’s license, then ran out of money.

• Went to India for three months.

• Started CoPress, a hosting company for student newspapers. It eventually folded.

• Interned for Publish2, a news tech startup. It eventually ran out of money.

• Did poorly at university, took a couple long breaks, and never ended up graduating.

Then, the summer of my “senior year” (2010), I lucked into a full-time job with the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. I did that for about a year before moving back to Oregon and joining Automattic for the first time.

My career since then has largely been at the intersection of media and technology.

What made you want to work at Automattic?

Location-independence was the big draw the first time I joined Automattic. My other job prospects at the time were location-based — Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe. I generally prioritize life over work, so I chose the “work remotely from Oregon” option.

More recently, after I was unexpectedly laid off in April, my priority was to find a stable J-O-B. I didn’t really think I’d go back to a company I already worked for, but the stars aligned and I rejoined Automattic in May.

It’s turned out better than I expected! In particular, I really enjoy my team, and that we get to work on some ambitious projects. Plus, I’m generally able to achieve my optimal work/life balance.

What does your day to day look like?

Today is actually fairly representative:

• Woke up around 4 am, made some chai, started catching up on P2 conversations.

• Once I had my bearings for the day, I reviewed one pull request and spent a couple hours on another. Our codebase is a melange of JavaScript and PHP.

• Watched a division townhall where they reviewed financial performance and a couple recent product releases.

• Went for a swim.

• Raced back from the swim to join a technical discussion about an upcoming feature.

• Showered, made a smoothie, and headed into my office, where I’m now working on this blog post.

Some days are more code-heavy. Others, like today, are some combination of code and coordination.

What’s next for you in your career?

I have no idea!

While visiting our good friends Shane and Angela in Boston, this meant…

As I learned the hard way, running the Timberline Trail is really hard. I’m proud to report I completed all 41 miles with 9k feet of elevation gain in 14 hours 33 minutes. Plus, I was fortunate to do it with a great crew (Nick, Michael, Jordan) on an absolutely gorgeous day.

For the unacquainted, the Timberline Trail is a big ol’ loop around Mt. Hood. Most people take 3-4 days to backpack it, enjoying the incredibly diverse ecosystems and views around the mountain. The more hardcore folks (and saps who get suckered into it) try to run it as fast as they can. And if the distance and elevation isn’t hard enough, there are about 20 steam crossings to contend with and the trail quality can be quite variable.

The key to completing? Don’t bonk. If you let your body end up in a depleted state, you’re a goner. For me this meant:

• Consuming 250 calories/hour, even when I really didn’t want a sixth Gu.
• Keeping my heart rate under 150/bpm, even if it meant splitting our group at the 14 mile mark (Nick wanted to do a sub-12 hour pace). Super thankful to Jordan for running with me.
• Salt tablets (you lose a lot of salt), caffeine in small doses, and Tylenol to deaden the pain.
• Some pretty awesome gear: Katadyn BeFree 0.6L water bottle, longer running shorts with a liner, Tifosi Photochromic Sunglasses, and a new Garmin Forerunner 245 (thanks to Automattic’s fitness tracker perk).

If you do bonk, you might be 10 miles from a trailhead. So don’t bonk.

I turned 35 yesterday! In no particular order, here are 35 things I’m grateful for:

1. Good health, and good overall physical condition.
2. The opportunity to grow older each year with my amazing wife.
3. My kids’ bubbly spirits and zest for life.
4. The love of my parents and siblings.
5. Oatly, Blue Lotus Chai, and stevia to make my morning chai.
6. Ending up in a job I really enjoy after the stress of getting laid off from my dream job.
7. Perks of working remote in an async environment: no commute, optimizing for my natural energy flows, and seeing my family throughout the day.
8. Willa, who is always in a good mood. #goals
9. Oregon’s natural beauty — the coast, the Willamette Valley, the high dessert.
10. Books that broaden my worldview, most recently: Unsettled. Natural climate variability seems like a far greater challenge than human CO2 emission.
11. When you’re staying in a house without air conditioning and the overnight temperature drops to 53℉ instead of 68℉.
12. The internet, and all the exchange of knowledge it facilitates.
13. The breadth of topics on Conversations with Tyler.
14. Fishing for salmon with my dad.
15. The occasional long walk with my mom.
16. A great set of teammates from across the globe: Brazil, Jamaica, Spain, Poland, Montenegro, New Zealand.
17. Psyllium husk.
18. 1% infinity — every day tiny improvements can produce substantial change over time.
19. The value of editing.
20. People who, for all their faults, move humanity forward.
21. Learning how to lift weights last September. Even the little bit I do makes me feel much stronger and capable.
22. The privilege to introduce my kids to the world. It’s incredibly warming to have their eyes light up at something I take for granted.
23. Friends I’ve had for ten, twenty, and thirty years.
24. The opportunity to make new friends every day.
25. A good night sleep.
26. An awesome trail run on a cold, crisp morning.
27. My mom’s blueberry cobbler.
28. My dad’s fish and chips.
29. Keeping a whimsical perspective on life (“my number one goal is to stay alive” and “non-stop fun all the time”) which helps me roll with the punches.
30. How much I’ve been able to travel, and how those experiences have shaped who I am.
31. PHP is better than JavaScript.
32. Living on a cul-de-sac where my kids can run around for hours.
33. Celebrating my birthday for an entire week (the “birthday week” tradition). This past week: McKenzie River trail run, sushi, homemade pizza, Chettinad with friends, weekend in Sunriver with my family.
34. Everything I’m forgetting to mention.
35. Being grateful.

For example, yesterday I discussed user research with Marko, my new lead. Here’s how I framed my perspective:

“A good outcome would be:

• We have just enough customer research to answer our product questions.
• The team is fully aware of the “voice of the customer”, and uses it to guide product decisions.
• We ship the right product, it squarely addresses customer need, and is successful in the market.

A bad outcome would be:

• We build what we think we should build, without any customer input.
• Our product isn’t successful in the market, because we haven’t addressed customer need.”

Boom! Immediate clarity to the conversation. If we agree on the desired outcome, we can start brainstorming how we get there. If we don’t agree on the desired outcome, there’s no point in endlessly talking about what we might do.

All too often, a discussion turns into an argument because Person A is talking about apples and Person B is talking about oranges. “Good outcome, bad outcome” is an amazingly effective way to create clarity and gain alignment.

Forever grateful to Justin Kistner for the hack.

Problem Statement

What problem are customers having?

Like coding, teaching is hard to do well. I’m still very much a newbie. For lack of a structured opportunity to learn, I’ve always cobbled bits together from what others have passed along. In that spirit, here are some of my lessons from the past two weeks.

What’s going well

ScratchJr is a great place for younger kids to start. After watching a 4 minute YouTube introduction, they understood the interface well-enough to start. In the first week’s session, they started with the drive across the city and run a race challenges. After they successfully completed those, I handed out ScratchJr Coding Cards to each table. In the second week’s session, moving a frog up the stairs with a loop turned out to be much more of a challenge than I had anticipated. Afterwards, they created their own challenge for a neighbor.

Intentional design decisions are a point of leverage. Each kid sits in a table of three. If they have a question, they have to ask one of their table mates before flagging a helper. This approach reduces burden on the helpers, gets them an answer quicker, and creates an opportunity for kids to be a teacher too. Additionally, we intentionally limited the club to 15 students from kindergarten through second grade, which is very manageable.

What’s could be improved

Even though I plan a few days ahead, I still feel like I’m flying by the seat of my pants. For next week’s session (the third in the series), we’re moving on from ScratchJr to code.org. However, instead of starting at the beginning of the curriculum, I picked out a lesson based on where I think the kids are at. Will it blend? We’ll see!

I would love to have access to a library of engaging “what is coding?” videos. At the beginning of each session, I spend 10-20 minutes introducing core concepts: languages, algorithms, loops, functions, etc. To help reinforce the idea, I try to tie it to a real-world example. However, I’d much prefer to show a hip, entertaining 3-5 minute video — the SchoolHouse Rock version of “what is a function?”.

“Done is” bridges this gap by offering a lightweight style for explicitly defining acceptance criteria at the end of a task:

My awesome task

A ton of great detail about the task.

Done is:
- Simple sentence describing the first acceptance criteria.
- Another sentence describing the second acceptance criteria.
- A third acceptance criteria if there is one.

Uncertainty breeds discontent

A missing definition of done can easily cause a rift between the task creator and the task implementer.

The rift starts when the implementer thinks they’re done and hands off the work for review. The creator becomes irritated when they discover the work is missing pieces P, Q, and R. The rift gets worse when the implementer knows they need to add P, Q, and R, but also realizes there might also be an unstated S, T, and U.

The root cause of this frustration? Implicit information that could’ve been explicit.

“Done is” provides clarity

Later this morning, I need to make lunches for my kids. In our project management system, the task might look like this:

Pack Kids’ Lunches

Ava prefers half a bagel with cream cheese, and Charlie likes a bean burrito. The lunch boxes are under the sink.

The task title is good because it’s actionable, and the task description has useful context. However, there’s lots of important but unstated nuance.

Adding a definition of “Done is” makes the end deliverable even more explicit:

Pack Kids’ Lunches

Ava prefers half a bagel with cream cheese, and Charlie likes a bean burrito. The lunch boxes are under the sink.

Done is:
- Each lunch has a fruit or vegetable, a main item, and a secondary item.
- The lunches have passed the kids’ inspections.
- Each kid has a lunch packed in their backpack.

Hack work with “Done is”

Over the last several years, I’ve found “Done is” to be an incredibly helpful communication tool.

“Done is” provides a simple mechanism to explicitly define a task’s, often implicit, acceptance criteria. The list format makes it easy to skim as work progresses. Furthermore, it can act as a bellwether for the quality of a task. If “Done is” has more than five bullet points, the task may need to be broken down into smaller pieces. Or, if it’s difficult to communicate what “Done is”, the task may need further consideration.

“Done is” makes it obvious what done is.

Many thanks to Samuel for the introduction.

WordPress tries to be helpful by automatically making your images responsive. It adds sizes and srcset attributes to each <img> to ensure a properly sized file is used at each screen width. Unfortunately, these values are almost always incorrect.

Even worse, there’s no easy fix. Responsive images are one of those historically complex, oft-misunderstood frontend development topics. Or, at least, they have always been difficult for me to understand. Recently, to solve Google Lighthouse’s “Properly size images” warning for our sites, I jumped in anyway, pushed through the misery, and finally figured out a solution.

What’s happening when Google Lighthouse complains about “Properly size images”

This epic journey all came about because of the “Properly size images” warning in Google Lighthouse. When Google Lighthouse complains your images aren’t properly sized, it’s saying you are using too large of an image file for how the image displays on the page. Google Lighthouse inspects your page in a simulated Moto G4 browser, but the problem can exist across all browser widths.

Let’s dive into a specific example.

In the example above, the image displays at 300 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall. However, the image file is 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels tall. The image file is too large for the browser viewport. When the size of the actual file exceeds the size of the expected file by 4kb or more, Google Lighthouse flags it as an improperly sized image.

“OK, easy to fix. I will simply resize the image to 300 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall. Boom: problem solved.”

Not so fast! The problem is more complex than that. Because the image appears at various widths as the browser width changes, the file variations you include need to accommodate the responsiveness of the design as well. Additionally, you need to make sure the image has 2x and 3x versions at each browser width for high density displays.

The solution is responsive images, but now you have two problems.

First, start with the sizes attribute

The mistake I’ve always made is to shove more image widths into the srcset attribute and call it a day. I assumed WordPress’ automatically generated sizes attribute was correct, and a manually prepared sizes attribute was a nice optimization.

In reality, having the correct sizes attribute is critical. The sizes attribute tells the browser how the image will be displayed at various browser widths. Only once you have a correct sizes attribute can you know what image widths you need in the srcset attribute.

Let’s look at our prior examples again.

Calculating the sizes attribute requires knowing how the image displays at various browser widths. In the first example, the image displays at 100% of the browser width. Because this is the mobile version, we can use 100vw (100% of the viewport width) as the default value for the sizes attribute: sizes="100vw". In the second example, the image displays at 50% of the browser width. We’ll add it to the sizes attribute with a media query: sizes="(min-width: 1024px) 50vw, 100vw". Simple, right?

Unfortunately, it’s a total pain and relatively error-prone to manually calculate the sizes attribute. Responsive site designs are rarely as simple as the example above. Plus, you’ll likely have a dozen or more images on a page with varying presentations.

Responsive Image Linter saves the day!

Fortunately, an awesome open source project called Responsive Image Linter can calculate the sizes attribute for you. Thank you Russell Heimlich for the tip. Simply install the bookmarklet, run it against the page, and it shows an analysis for each image:

Once you’ve applied the suggested changes, your image will pass the lint:

When I’ve manually calculated the sizes attribute in the past, it was pretty much always wrong. With Responsive Image Linter, I get the sizes attribute correct on the first try!

Second, add srcset widths after the sizes attribute is correct

Now that your sizes attributes are correct, it’s possible to calculate the necessary srcset widths for your images. But what should they be?

Responsive Image Linter saves the day again! A couple weeks ago, I opened an issue suggesting Responsive Image Linter provide recommended widths for srcset images. The maintainer, Martin Auswöger, thought it was a good idea and was open to sponsorship for it.

Responsive Image Linter now suggests recommended widths for srcset images:

Identifying these best widths is more of an art than it is a science. Here’s a summary of how Responsive Image Linter’s algorithm works:

When the linter runs, it resizes the viewport (browser window) to many different dimensions and checks how large each image is for each viewport.

The calculateSuggestedDimenions algorithm then takes this data and searches for image widths that appear often. These sizes are most likely statically sized images (non-fluid) and their exact widths are added to the recommendation list as @1x and @2x versions.

Next, it adds the lowest and largest measured size of the image to the recommendation list too.

From this list it then removes sizes that are less than 0.2 megapixels apart. Gaps in that list of sizes that are larger than 0.75 megapixels get divided into equal parts of less than 0.75 megapixels.

At the end of all of this we get a list of image widths where every gap between them is from 0.2 to 0.75 megapixel large. And for the non-fluid sized parts of an image we have an exact match for @1x and @2x screen resolutions.

As of January 2022, what’s going on in Google Lighthouse is actually much simpler than Responsive Image Linter’s algorithm. When Google Lighthouse shows the “Properly size images” warning, it is only looking at one viewport width (that of the Moto G4). For a given image, Google Lighthouse computes the actual pixels displayed (width and height), compares this value to the total number of pixels in the file, and throws a warning if the difference between the two exceeds the 4kb threshold. This may change in the future.

For additional context, here are a few other helpful links I came across in my research:

• Applying srcset: choosing the right sizes for responsive images at different breakpoints. Some synthetic testing around which are the most commonly used image sizes. The author produced a Vue component to “quickly create responsive image tags with an optimal number of image sources for all devices.” It uses this underlying responsive-image-sizes library.
• Responsive Images 101, Part 9: Image Breakpoints. A canonical article on the topic.
• How do you determine a good set of breakpoints for srcset image sizes. Accepted answer is some real world research into the most common screen resolutions, and image size opinions based on them.

Workflow for solving “Properly size images” in WordPress

The primary pages on our sites now pass the “Properly size images” check. It took a good amount of effort though, so I identified some strategies to streamline the process.

Don’t bother with sizes or srcset until your design is complete

When building a new page, I think it’s best to not bother with the sizes or srcset attributes until the design is complete. Because they will change as the design changes, it’s simply extra work to prematurely optimize your images. Once the page is complete, run Responsive Image Linter to identify the necessary sizes and srcset attributes.

Apply sizes to template images by passing it as an argument:

<?php
echo wp_get_attachment_image(
	$thumbnail_id,
	'thumbnail',
	false,
	[
		'class' => 'rounded-full w-20 md:w-24 h-20 md:h-24 mb-2',
		'sizes' => '(min-width: 780px) 96px, 80px',
	]
);

For images in the post content, you’ll need to filter wp_calculate_image_sizes. I’d suggest adding the filter early on the_content, and then removing it late, to avoid having the filter impact other parts of your theme.

Have a system for generating image width variations

For images hardcoded into the theme template, my preference has always been to commit the images directly into the Git repository. I wrote a little script to streamline the process of creating the necessary image widths:

$ wp tbc generate-image-widths --widths=270,560,890 --compress assets/images/tasty-recipes-sales/cards/elegant.png
Generated elegant-270x325.png (47kb->14kb)
Generated elegant-560x675.png (169kb->48kb)
Generated elegant-890x1073.png (365kb->103kb)
Success: Image widths created.

The --compress flag throws the image against TinyPNG, which somehow is able to magically compress the image much more than WordPress can.

Use just the right amount of add_image_size()

For images embedded into the post content, WordPress will dynamically assign sizes and srcset attributes as the post is rendered.

For the sizes attribute, there’s one thing to be aware of: unless you’d like to calculate the value for each image in the post content, the sizes will almost always be incorrect. Images can be varying widths within the post content. I think the best thing to do is to figure out the sizes attribute for an image that is 100% of the post content width, and use that for all of the images.

For the srcset attribute, WordPress inserts any “thumbnails” (size variations registered with add_image_size() ) that match the proportions of the original image. The defaults are somewhat sufficient out of the box. If they aren’t, your options include:

1. Ignore the problem.
2. Register more thumbnails with add_image_size(), and then “regenerate thumbnails” for all of the images in your Media Library. The latter can be hours of script execution on a larger site.
3. Use an image CDN to dynamically generate additional image widths.

We ended up doing a combination of options 2 and 3. For the most part, I added another image size or two on each site. On Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro, we’re using Cloudflare to dynamically generate a few additional image widths:

add_filter(
	'wp_calculate_image_srcset',
	function( $sources, $size_array, $image_src, $image_meta, $attachment_id ) {
		$full_src = wp_get_attachment_url( $attachment_id );
		if ( ! $full_src ) {
			return $sources;
		}

		$widths = [ 480, 680, 960, 1080 ];
		foreach ( $widths as $width ) {
			if ( isset( $sources[ $width ] )
			|| $width >= $size_array[0] ) {
				continue;
			}
			$url = sprintf(
				'https://pinchofyum.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=%d,height=%s,fit=scale-down/%s',
				$width,
				99999,
				ltrim( wp_parse_url( $full_src, PHP_URL_PATH ), '/' )
			);

			$sources[ $width ] = [
				'url'        => $url,
				'descriptor' => 'w',
				'value'      => $width,
			];
		}
		return $sources;
	},
	10,
	5
);

Et voila! You’ve solved “Properly size images” for your WordPress site.

Relatively flat hikes

Warrior Point. 7 mile out and back on Sauvie Island. The destination is kinda meh but the view of the Columbia along the way is really cool. Stop by my other aunt’s for a glass of wine when you’re done :)

Wildwood trail between Germantown and Newberry Road. 11 mile out and back in a nice part of Forest Park. It’s generally less trafficked than Leif Erikson, although the parking lot can still fill up. I usually start from Germantown.

Hagg Lake. 13-14 mile loop around, you guessed it, Hagg Lake. It’s very muddy at this time of year, so would be better to save for June or later.

Timothy Lake Loop. Beautiful 15 mile loop for the summer. Not sure if the trailhead is accessible in the winter (snow).

Hikes with more elevation

Dog Mountain. 6.5 mile out and back with a great view down the Gorge. It requires a permit in the high season. I went a couple weeks prior to the beginning of the 2021 season and we were able to get a parking spot at 7 am. Lot was full by the time we got back down though.

Neahkanie Mountain. My favorite hike :) North of Manzanita. I usually prefer an out and back from the ocean trailhead, which ends up being ~6 miles.

Paradise Park from Timberline. Summer hike of 12 miles and 2300 feet of elevation gain. Gets busy but still worth doing because it has awesome lunch spot views of Mt. Hood.

Table Mountain. When you’re ready for 4300 feet of elevation gain over 16 miles, this is your jam!

One of Google Lighthouse’s peskiest problems is “Eliminate render-blocking resources.” Here’s the nut of it:

1. Your style.css file can easily end up as 100+ kilobytes.
2. Downloading this stylesheet blocks page render.
3. Because Google wants to display the page as quickly as possible, Lighthouse throws a warning if your stylesheet is greater than 14kb.

The established solution is to extract and inline your critical CSS. Essentially, you put styles used above the fold in an inline <style></style> tag, and delay loading the main stylesheet until the page is rendered.

It’s relatively straightforward to generate critical CSS for a static site. Not so much for WordPress! WordPress has dynamic content on each page. If you only scrape the template file for your HTML, you’ll miss the markup in the dynamic content. Plus, production data is likely different than local data, so the HTML needs to be generated in production.

Not satisfied with the alternatives, we built our own solution.

TinyBit Critical CSS

Our solution for inline critical CSS on WordPress is two-fold:

• tinybit-critical-css-server (“the server”) is a Node.js application that can run on Google Cloud Functions. It performs the critical CSS calculation.
• tinybit-critical-css-plugin (“the plugin”) is a WordPress plugin that communicates with the server and integrates the critical CSS into your site.

At a high level, here’s how the system works:

1. The process is initiated by WP-CLI or the refresh webhook.
2. When triggered, the plugin does a server-side render of the given WordPress page. After the page is rendered, its HTML and CSS are sent to the server.
3. The server renders the HTML and CSS inside a headless browser to compute the critical CSS.
4. When the server returns a successful response, the plugin stores critical CSS to the filesystem.
5. Now that the critical CSS exists, it is included inline and the stylesheet is deferred.

One key element to our solution: server-side page renders. The plugin renders and captures the HTML page directly in the generation process. This lets us avoid some complexities: the server needing to bypass cache, the site needing to be web-accessible to the server, etc. Instead, the plugin is able to provide exactly the HTML and CSS to be evaluated.

Our approach is also opt-in on a page-by-page basis. If you have lots of varying pages, you may only care about inline critical CSS for your landing pages.

Alternatives

There are at least a couple of alternatives you could consider: WP Rocket and Autoptimize.

WP Rocket appears to use a similar approach with its own hosted service. There are a few differences, though. First, instead of rendering the page server-side, WP Rocket makes a request back to your site. This request has to bypass cache entirely in order to have the most up-to-date HTML and CSS. Second, WP Rocket picks a somewhat random assortment of pages, so you’ll probably need to tune that. Third, WP Rocket is a large plugin with lots of bells and whistles you may not want in the context of solving this problem.

Autoptimize is a similar implementation to WP Rocket, except it instead requires a paid subscription to criticalcss.com. Autoptimize too does a lot more than critical CSS, so be prepared for configuration tweaking.

If you don’t want to maintain your own Node.js server, both of these would be reasonable to consider.

On the left is my new Apple 13" MacBook Pro M1, with 16 GB RAM and 500 GB SSD. On the right is my old MBP, which conveniently started having battery issues in December.

M1 so fast! I was very skeptical but now I’m a true believer. The keyboard is quality, too. Now that it has a dedicated ESC key, I’m beginning to think I could get used to the Touch Bar.

Previously: 2018, 2014, 2011.

After a bit of research and experimentation, I’m really happy with the Laravel Forge + Digital Ocean + DeployHQ solution I’ve put together. It was way easier than I thought it would be.

Web nodes

We’re using Laravel Forge to manage two Digital Ocean droplets. These droplets sit behind Digital Ocean’s load balancer product, and the load balancer sits behind CloudFlare.

Forge’s specific advantages are:

• All of the software necessary for Laravel is installed for you.
• There’s a nice admin panel for managing scheduled jobs, queues, and other Laravel-specific configuration.

Originally, I tested out Digital Ocean’s new App Platform. However, deployments took too long for my liking (~6-10 minutes). There were a few other things I ran into that gave me pause, too. For instance, you have to provision another container for the queue, and it’s unclear as to whether a deploy will blow away a job in progress.

SSL in front of the load balancer was a bit tricky. Digital Ocean can’t provision a LetsEncrypt certificate unless you also manage your DNS with Digital Ocean. Fortunately, it’s possible to install CloudFlare’s origin certificate on the load balancer, and then use CloudFlare for SSL.

Deployments

For atomic deploys, DeployHQ ended up working way better than I expected. It’s pretty much magic; they’ve done a really good job with their product.

Here’s how it works:

1. GitHub sends a ping to DeployHQ on a push to master.
2. DeployHQ fetches the latest, runs npm run prod and composer install, and then syncs only the changed files to a release folder on the server. The rest of the release folder is copied directly on the server from the previous release.
3. DeployHQ syncs the .env file to the release folder on each server.
4. After the release is ready, DeployHQ updates the symlink to point to the new release.

That’s it! Seriously, I’m very impressed with how well it works.

Storage

Because I want to manage as few servers as possible, we’re using Digital Ocean’s managed MySQL and Redis. For both of these products, system admin is easy peasy lemon squeezy — nothing. I also get easy access to logs and, if we need to add more capacity, I can easily add replicas.

For uploads, we’re using Digital Ocean Spaces: 250GB storage and 1 TB outbound for only $5/month. It seems like too good of a deal.

Scaling

In the future, if I need to add more web server capacity, I’ll simply:

1. Provision another droplet with Laravel Forge.
2. Once the droplet is live, start a deploy with DeployHQ. After the deploy is complete, set up the symlink from deploy to app.upfocus.io.
3. Grant access for the droplet to connect to MySQL and Redis.
4. Configure the queue and scheduled jobs on the server.
5. Add the server to the load balancer pool.

All in all, I think this setup should serve us well for a while. It seems like the right balance between power and simplicity.

Happy to take any questions in the comments or on Twitter!

Ugh. Pandemic. Didn’t see that one coming last year.

We’re fortunate to have found many silver linings in the experience. The pandemic has also been difficult, and some of the policy decisions still make my blood boil.

COVID-19

Overall, I think the last year represents a catastrophic failing of public health. Medical science did great; public health not so much.

For example, a human challenge trial is where you quickly determine efficacy for a vaccine by deliberately infecting a small number of volunteers with the virus. I volunteered to participate in one, along with ~39k others around the world. That we didn’t run human challenge trials over the summer, which could’ve enabled mass vaccinations as early as August or September, represents a catastrophic failing of medical ethics.

Much, if not most, of the virus’ spread is caused by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic transmission. At-home rapid antigen tests, which work much like a pregnancy test, can be used to significantly curtail the disease. They’ve been approved in Europe for months. That rapid antigen tests aren’t widely available in the United States represents a catastrophic failing of our regulatory state.

It’s hard to say what the next few months will bring.

The best case outcome is effective mass vaccination. Vaccine clinics would be open 24/7, everyone would receive a first dose first, and access would be prioritized based on risk.

A worse outcome is a slow, bungled mass vaccination. Vaccine clinics would only open during business hours (and closed during the holidays), second doses would sit in storage for weeks, and access would be prioritized based on union membership.

A horrible outcome is a 1.5x more infectious COVID strain that causes a massive, uncontrollable fourth wave of infections (here’s a follow-up analysis). I really hope this doesn’t happen.

Silver Lining

Summertime

We had a great summer.

One of the highlights was our regular neighborhood happy hour. Every Thursday afternoon, many of our neighbors would gather in the cul-de-sac (socially distanced, of course) and shoot the shit for an hour or two. When Leah and I moved to Tualatin, we felt culturally isolated: hip urban millennials in a conservative backwater. I’m happy to report that, even though we live in suburbia, our neighbors are great people and we enjoy hanging out with them.

We also took advantage this summer of our close proximity to the Tualatin River. At least a couple times a week, we pumped up our SUPs and relaxed for a few hours on the water. The kids loved swimming with their friends. To cap it off, for our 7th anniversary, Leah packed up some Burmese food and we had a dinner picnic on the water.

In August, we packed up a r-pod for a 10 day RV extravaganza. After a couple of days at the beach, we drove east to meet up with the Kistners in Coeur d’Alene. We had a great time biking the Route of the Hiawatha, swimming in the camp pool, and eating yummy food. Then, for the last night on the way home, we boondocked on a sheep farm. Ava and Charlie had a great time feeding and milking the sheep.

To wrap up the awesome summer, Willa joined our family. She’s a total joy and loves exploring, going on long walks, and meeting strangers. It’s funny how people can change. Leah and I never considered ourselves to be dog people; here we are now, with a puppy we love.

The Startup

Justin and I finally picked a name in January: Upfocus. After spending the year iterating on the product and signing up some customers, we’re headed towards a public launch next month.

Overall, I’m still achieving the goals I set out for myself. Although we’ve set and missed various milestones along the way, we’re making steady incremental progress and enjoying the journey. The question for the coming year is whether we can find traction…

Quantified Self

According to Goodreads, I read 32 books over the year (not quite hitting my original goal of 35). Of this set, my favorites were:

• Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. If you live in a blue state, Dignity is required reading to better understand America. Both the words and pictures are deeply moving.

• The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World. An engaging, eye-opening read. Truman might be the most underrated president ever.

• Three wonderful collections of sci-fi short stories: Exhalation, Stories of Your Life and Others, and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories.

A special shout-out to Erik Larson this year. His tellings of history are reliably enjoyable, let it be the rise of Hitler, Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister, or America’s entry into World War 1.

According to Strava, I ran 774.6 miles in 126 runs (average of 6.15 miles per run). Funny enough, this is pretty close to what I did last year (775 miles in 121 runs). In the last several weeks, I’ve dialed down to ~2 runs/week as I rack up the miles on my treadmill desk.

According to TripIt, I traveled 6,108 miles in 12 days on 3 trips. The big one was Mexico City in the Before Times. I also visited Justin once, and skied with Albert and Will in Utah just before everything hit the fan.

2021

Like everyone else, my main hope for the foreseeable future is the continued health of my family.

Stay safe!

I recently (fall 2018) declined a job opportunity because of an onerous non-complete.

I work in an industry (WordPress-related products and services) where several large companies have their hands in most lines of business. I applied to work at one of them and received an offer to become a Principal Engineer. However, the non-compete was so broad (“any business in competition with the Company’s business as conducted by the Company at any time during the course of my employment with the Company”) that, if I were fired on day one, I effectively couldn’t do my line of work anymore.

I hired an employment lawyer but the company was unwilling to modify the contract or include any riders. The irony is that the company has a different employment agreement for Californians, which doesn’t include a non-compete in the contract.

Ultimately, non-competes are anti-competitive because there’s a huge power asymmetry that adds a lot of downside risk to employees.

If you have personal experience too, I’d encourage you to submit a comment!

The soaring cost of housing has created gaping inequalities and inflamed both generational and geographical divides. In 1990 a generation of baby-boomers, with a median age of 35, owned a third of America’s real estate by value. In 2019 a similarly sized cohort of millennials, aged 31, owned just 4%.

Home ownership is the West’s biggest economic-policy mistake

Over the past 70 years housing has undergone a remarkable transformation. Until the mid-20th century house prices across the rich world were fairly stable (see chart). From then on, however, they boomed both relative to the price of other goods and services and relative to incomes. Rents went up, too. The Joint Centre for Housing Studies of Harvard University finds that the median American rent payment rose 61% in real terms between 1960 and 2016 while the median renter’s income grew by 5%.

How housing became the world’s biggest asset class

Broadly speaking, three types of planning systems exist across the rich world: discretion-based; autocratic; and rules-based. The first type is commonly found in Commonwealth countries. Local residents have plenty of power to stop development plans, and they frequently do. It may be no coincidence that those countries have in recent decades seen the fastest growth in house prices, says Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics. Parts of America follow similar rules. In San Francisco every permit is appealable and, since very few large-scale projects match existing building and planning codes, delays are common.

Autocratic planning systems do a better job of boosting housing supply. Russia has raised its annual rate of housebuilding from 400,000 a year in the early 2000s to over 1m. Singaporeans who protest against development are routinely ignored, says one with a house located near Tengah forest, some of which will soon be razed to make way for apartment blocks.

The third group—rules-based planning systems—are commonly found in European countries such as France and Germany. If developers tick all the boxes then construction is permitted, even if local residents object. These systems have generally done a better job of delivering housing. Since the 1950s Germany has built twice the number of houses as Britain, despite having only a slightly higher population.

Politicians are finally doing something about housing shortages

America has some of the most generous fiscal incentives to become a home-owner. Official estimates suggest that the government forgoes over $200bn a year (over 1% of GDP) subsidizing homeowners through the tax code, with policies including a tax deduction on mortgage interest and not taxing the income homeowners implicitly earn by avoid paying rent.

Home ownership is in decline

More radical reforms could be considered. German mortgage-lenders embrace an unusual appraisal technique. When assessing the value of a house, they rarely refer to the market price; instead, they consider “mortgage-lending value”, an assessment of the probable price of a house over the economic cycle. A report from the Bank for International Settlements, a club of central banks, suggests that by discounting short-term price fluctuations, this valuation technique can stop bubbles from forming.

What is the future of the rich world’s housing markets?

This year cemented my transition into adulthood. Sure, I’ve had kids for several years but those were awkward years like being a teenager is awkward. It’s only after you’ve sent your first off to kindergarten, coached her soccer team, and sat on a city advisory committee that you know you’ve made it.

Jump to: Unnamed Startup | Instagrammin’ | Book Recommendations

Professionally Speaking

June

My greatest professional accomplishment of the year: taking off the entire month of June.

We kicked things off by traveling to Japan with my parents. They’ve never been to Asia before, so it was a great introduction for them. After landing in Tokyo, we spent a few days in Hakone, a hill town just south. One highlight was the private onsen (outdoor hot springs) in our Airbnb. From Hakone, we went to Kyoto for a bunch of sightseeing (while staying in another amazing Airbnb), and then wrapped up their trip with a couple days in Tokyo. After saying goodbye to my parents, Leah and I took the kids up to Sapporo for a week, and then recovered from the Japan jet lag with a week in Maui. Rough, I know. For the last week of June, I went fishing in Alaska with my dad, uncles, cousin, and some other dudes.

I consider this epic adventure to be a professional accomplishment because:

1. I literally didn’t do any work for the entire month.

2. Most self-employed are horrible at taking time off, and end up working even when they’re “on vacation”.

3. Amazingly, I didn’t have to deal with any client fires, and none of my clients fired me.

Taking a full month off every couple of years seems like a good life strategy.

Food Blogger Pro

If you read last year’s Year in Review, you might’ve noticed I was starting a new full-time job. And I did! And then I left a few months later.

Don’t worry, I still work for them as a contractor. I’d like to think everything is peachy. Hi Bjork! ?

The folks at Food Blogger Pro are absolutely wonderful people who I love to work with. Full-time wasn’t a good fit for a few specific personal reasons:

• As a contractor, my income is diversified across several clients. As a full-time employee, I only had one source of income. Unexpectedly, I felt less job security when I thought I would feel more.

• I lost a significant amount of the agency that comes with being self-employed (e.g. take vacation whenever you want, attend conferences, write off various web tools, etc.). Notably, I had already planned my June month off and didn’t feel quite right about doing so as a full-time employee.

• I didn’t feel like there was the proper incentive for me to invest as much of my creative energy as possible.

For me, the lesson learned was that, even though Food Blogger Pro was a really great job by all objective measures, I have a pretty high bar to exceed.

Unnamed Startup

In July, my business partner and I started working together on a new company. We haven’t picked a name yet, nor launched, and that’s just fine by us!

One of the things that’s going really well: only working on the company part-time. This has greatly reduced my stress, and prevents the startup from impinging on family life. Because both my partner and I are able to meet our financial needs with part-time consulting, we have essentially infinite runway to find product/market fit. Or market/founder/product fit. Or whateveryoucallit.

We’ve also found a pretty good cadence. We get together every six weeks (either him traveling down to me or me up to him) and set OKRs for our next six week period. Having OKRs keeps us from constantly questioning our direction; having time together gives us the opportunity for us to have much deeper conversations and course-correct as necessary.

The worst cliché in business is that having a partner is like marriage without the sex. I’m happy (?) to report that it’s true. A business partnership is an emotionally-fraught relationship, with lots of ups and downs. We’re fortunate that we’ve already been able to work through a few rough patches. I’d like to think we’re getting better at reconciling our differences too.

Ironically, because I have something on the side to work on, I’m also enjoying my consulting work much more.

Family Life

After Ava started kindergarten this year, we went from somewhat flexible routine to fully assimilated into the system. I’m amazed we manage to get her to the bus stop every morning at 7:20. It’s been a pretty great experience for her though. She’s attending Bridgeport Elementary, where I went too, and is in the “two-way immersion program”. Her Spanish accent is already quite good.

Charlie is bumping along being his happy self. Every Tuesday and Thursday he enjoys hanging out with his high school buddies in the Tiny Timberwolves program. At home, he enjoys playing Uno with Ava for hours and will soon be catching up to her on a two-wheeler.

Leah continues to find opportunities to define herself beyond the all-consuming role of “mom”. Notably, she took a wood block printing class this fall and produced some fabulous art. As a mom, she’s proud of the effort she put towards helping Ava grow as a reader.

Outside of work, I really enjoyed participating in the Tualatin 2040 Community Advisory Committee. Along with HB 2001, the Housing Needs Analysis and Economic Opportunity Analysis documents we produced are foundational elements to what I hope will be transformative policy changes in the near future.

Instagrammin'

Here are some highlights of the year from Instagram:

Quantified Self

According to Goodreads, I read 50 books over the year (with an original goal of 30). Of this set, my favorites were:

• The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un, Bright Sun of the Twenty-first Century. The truth is stranger than fiction. A super fascinating read if you want to understand North Korea beyond what limited perspective the media provides.

• Camino Sunrise-Walking With My Shadows: One reluctant pilgrim packs a weighty load on a 500-mile path. Super fun book by Andrew’s dad that’ll make you want to walk the Camino.

• Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice. Legitimately a “real-life political thriller”. It’s hard to believe it’s real.

More so though, the following books excelled in the category of “surprisingly insightful explanations of underappreciated topics”:

• Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

• Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

• Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

I couldn’t recommend these three highly enough.

According to Strava, I ran 775 miles in 121 runs (average of 6.4 miles per run), way down from last year’s 167 runs. I’m still working out 5-6 days/week, so I think this is because I’ve added soccer and walking to my weekly routine.

According to TripIt, I traveled 29,170 miles in 43 days on 7 trips. Japan was my furthest destination. I also went to Maui, Alaska, Tuscon, Boston, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. Independent of my long trip, travel was way down and it felt good! I like doing things around home these days.

2020

Life is pretty good right now, so I don’t think I have any goals that would move the needle on my personal happiness.

One thing we’ve been doing as a family, which is working quite well, is creating a seasonal bucket list:

These aren’t things we have to do, but things we’d like to do. If we do them, great; if we don’t do them, no worries. Putting our bucket list on a whiteboard in a laundry room serves as a gentle reminder on the bigger picture items we’d like to accomplish.

For 2020, a few of my bucket list items might include:

• Getting my boater education card.

• Figuring out a system for the kids to earn and save money.

• Finding a good volunteer opportunity for the entire family.

• A fun weekend getaway for Leah and I.

I’m also pretty tempted to get back into flying…

There are always people here on IH looking to partner up as co-founders. Perhaps some stories would be useful to others who are currently looking.

For those with co-founders, how did you find yours?

I’m working with a co-founder right now and I highly, highly recommend it.

I’ve done a few solo projects where I felt like I was in a mental funk more often than not. It was really difficult to figure out what to do next, decide whether I was on the right track, etc. With a co-founder, I feel like we can achieve 4-8x what I could do a solo founder, simply because I have someone to collaborate with.

With this being said, I have had past business partnerships fall apart for one reason or another. In my experience, it’s really important to make sure you’re on the same page as your partner as it relates to motivations, level of commitment, and willingness to work together. If any of these are out of sync, it’s much more difficult to make the partnership work.

Probably the most important attribute to develop needs to be your ability to overcome disagreements. A business partnership is a highly emotional relationship, just like a marriage or long-term romantic relationship. There’s probably not enough written about managing emotions in business because being a jerk as a boss seems to be the accepted norm. Crucial Conversations is a favorite of mine.

To answer the original question, my co-founder and I were introduced through a mutual acquaintance to do some consulting work at a previous company he worked at. Now, two years later, we’re both consulting + starting our product company.

Patience goes a long way in forming a co-founder relationship. You’ll probably need to meet at least a few times in person, and you’ll likely need some existing foundation to build upon (hobbies in common, live in the same town, overlapping peer group, etc.).

Before we started, I identified my three personal goals for starting a company:

1. Have more fun than I’m having right now.
2. Work with people I enjoy.
3. Create opportunities to learn and grow.

These goals have been super helpful as we move along. For any given decision, I can simply ask “what will help me achieve my goals?” and the answer becomes obvious.

#goals. They’re great.

Simple Event Tracking is a new, easy-to-deploy Laravel application that lets you log events and then query how often they occur (in real-time).

Once you’ve deployed the application, simply POST to the /api/write endpoint:

$ http POST simple-event-tracking.test/api/write key=foo value=bar
{
    "status": "ok"
}

Then, when you have some events, query for summaries with a GET to the /api/read endpoint:

$ http GET simple-event-tracking.test/api/read key=foo --json --auth-type=token --auth="Bearer:<token-value>"
{
    "bar": 6
}

Easy mode!

Check out the project on GitHub if it strikes your fancy.

It would be neat if there was an app where you could see summarized updates from all of the people you want to subscribe to. Building on the /now pages micro trend, each person could publish their life summary as a periodically updated /now page. The app would simply track these to let you know when someone updated their page.

“Social media for people who update infrequently.”

1. The Hard Parts of Open Source (Evan Czaplicki) — Identifies a strong set of specific anti-patterns present in open source (e.g. “why don’t you just” and “all discussion is constructive”) and then goes into a major history deep dive on why they might be present.
2. ‘Restore My Neighborhood’: One Cascadian’s Take on Re-legalizing Housing (Sightline Institute) — Oregon House Bill 2001 is moving on! The next committee is Joint Committee on Ways and Means.
3. Everything I know about freelancing (Andy Adams) — Always fun to read about how others operate. Some points I agree with, others I don’t ?
4. Service Industry Coach (YouTube) — Having been up to my eyeballs with Food Blogger Pro for the last few months, I just love that this exists. Almost tempted to start a lawn mowing company.

Awesome upgrade for my shedquarters. Far superior to the transom windows.

Your script’s execution time can easily double if your migration script fetches images over HTTP or generates multiple thumbnail sizes. Because you’ll likely need to test your script multiple times, these inefficiencies can cause substantial delays in your project.

Fortunately, two simple tricks will save you a ton of time.

Cache remote images

If you’ve already downloaded an image once, do you need to download it again and again? Probably not. You need a cache!

Drop the migrate-import-cache.php code snippet into your mu-plugins directory in order to:

1. Return a remote file from the cache when it’s available.
2. Write the contents of a remote file to cache for use on the next run.

You’ll need to set a WP_IMPORT_CACHE constant to a writable directory. Also, this code assumes you’re using media_sideload_url()(or some other function based on wp_remote_get()).

https://gist.github.com/danielbachhuber/5cf816d99fd973cd5832a5715576ade8

Disable thumbnail generation

WordPress generates a few to several thumbnails for every image uploaded into the Media Library. These thumbnails usually aren’t necessary during development, so having WordPress create them wastes CPU and your time.

To disable thumbnail generation, simply override the registered image sizes prior to calling media_sideload_image():

https://gist.github.com/danielbachhuber/aad495d331f45d4a0ecd97f9f243b9e6

If you’d like to generate image thumbnails later on, simply use wp media regenerate (doc).

I’d like to add my testimony in support of HB 2001. While the bill’s specific details certainly would benefit from deliberate discussion, I think it’s critical that the state re-legalizes duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in single-family housing zones.

Why does the state need to mandate this? Because Oregon’s cities have proven themselves incapable of changing their zoning to allow for more homes to be built. In fact, it’s often the case that a city’s incentive is to restrict additional homes; the existing citizens don’t want to let anyone else in.

As an example, Tualatin (the city where I live and grew up) did literally the bare minimum to comply with Oregon Senate Bill 1051 (legalizing ADUs within single family housing zones). Because Tualatin still imposes a parking requirement for ADUs, only 44% of existing homes (based on research I did) are eligible to build an ADU. I personally would have to pave another driveway spot in my front lawn, which I don’t think my neighbors would appreciate.

When my wife and I bought our home in 2015, the sellers had six offers in twelve hours. We weren’t even the highest bidder — my sister played soccer with their daughter, so we played the family connection. And we closed the deal by putting 20% down on a $465k house. Is this attainable for most people?

In 2015, we had a tight, overpriced market. In 2019, we still have an overpriced market. Construction isn’t anywhere close to meeting the demand for the livable, walkable communities people want. And cities aren’t close to producing the necessary policies supporting this development. Legalizing missing middle housing is what’s necessary to provide more housing options, and it’s the responsibility of the state to step up when cities have fallen short.

This distinction between active notes and completed notes is key for how my mind works. Something about reducing mental clutter, or insert your diagnosis here. I want to keep the notes around for future reference but I want them stored on my shelf.

I’d love to instead have a dedicated app serve as my note archive. It could be web or cross-platform as long as it kept privacy at the forefront. Importantly, it would be read-only; it wouldn’t take on the concern of also providing an editing interface.

On Sunday, I survived my first day without coffee. Then yesterday, I survived a second day without coffee.

Pros of coffee abstinence include:

• Better sleep.
• Generally feeling a ton healthier.

Cons of coffee abstinence include:

• Low-grade headache and other withdrawal symptoms.
• Leah questioning my sanity.

I am back on the coffee today.

In scenarios where there isn’t already a cohesive group, organizing an event has two risks:

1. Will enough people sign up to make the planning effort worthwhile?
2. Will the people who signed up actually show up?

A Kickstarter for events could solve these two problems.

First, the event would have some minimum number of signups required for the event to happen. It doesn’t happen if it doesn’t achieve critical mass.

Next, the organizer would track which signups actually show up at the event. This data could then contribute to the attendee’s reputation score on the platform, and calculate the likelihood of attendence.

Problem worth solving? It seems mundane but I keep wanting this for situations I come across in the real world.

1. AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source (Stratechery) — How and why MongoDB is getting massively pinched by AWS.
2. Ideas for promoting your software product (Justin Jackson) — Good list of marketing ideas to test.
3. Noah Smith on Worker Compensation, Co-determination, and Market Power (Econ Talk) — Great debate on the nature of income inequality growth: whether it exists (because that’s not decided), and various labor market attributes that might influence it (e.g. the growth of temp agencies).
4. What Elon Musk Taught Me About Growing A Business (Dharmesh Shah) — The clearest articulation I’ve seen of organizational alignment and its importance. If your organization isn’t aligned, go back to start.

Monica is also open source on GitHub with an active community. It’s clear how this has influenced what the product is. I’d love to see Régis Freyd (the creator) turn Monica into a viable business too. This would ensure its long-term sustainability, and also help solve for product gaps (e.g. hiring for design polish).

Monica’s features

At its core, Monica is a contact database with various fields for each person:

For me, Monica’s main value proposition is that it:

1. Identifies the people I want to maintain relationships with.
2. Helps me be proactive about spending time with them.
3. Keeps track of their interests and what makes them tick.

It solves these use-cases in a few different ways.

Features I use

• Avatars.
  For every contact I enter, I make sure to include their email address so that Monica’s Gravatar integration kicks in. If they don’t have a Gravatar, I track down and upload a picture. Having faces on contact cards seems like a key feature, because they add a lot of humanity to the software.
• Birthdays.
  Probably the easiest way to be nice to someone is to wish them a happy birthday. It’s only once a year! When you enter someone’s birthday into Monica, you can also check a box to have Monica send you email reminders.
• Activities / phone calls / conversations / notes.
  It’s confusing these are currently broken out in the UI. Activities, phone calls, and conversations are essentially variations of the same thing: log entries. For a forgetful person like me, log entries help you remember what you’ve done with a person and key details about each interaction.
• Gifts.
  For the several people I give gifts, it’s really helpful to have a place to collect ideas throughout the year. One small suggested enhancement: the ability to indicate when a gift was given.

Features I’d change or improve

• Unified interaction stream
  At their core, each activity, phone call, conversation or note is an interaction. Monica’s UX could greatly improve by unifying these into one stream with a standardized posting interface at the top.
• Lightweight reminders
  Some people I want to connect with on a regular basis (e.g. bi-weekly). Other people are looser acquaintances that I’d be fine to say hello to every six months or so. With a “nudge” feature, I’d indicate how often I want a suggestion and then Monica could intelligently tell me “you should call this person” or “have you considered going running with this person?”.
• iCal birthday feed
  My own address book is a mess. If Monica contains all of the birthdays I consider important, it would be great if I could subscribe to these on my calendar.
• Decisions, not options
  Monica would benefit from “Decisions, Not Options” (see WordPress’ philosophy). Rather than having UI to disable features, it should have strong opinions about how it should be used. For example, “Tasks” seems to conflict conceptually with “Reminders”. I’ve opted for using the latter. Similarly, I’ve also disabled the “Documents” feature.

Monetizing open source

Because I’d like to see Monica thrive sustainably, I thought I’d offer some unsolicited suggestions around making money. My only qualifications are that I’ve failed multiple times to monetize open source.

What open source is

It’s important to understand that open source can either be a:

1. Way to hack on a side project with random people from around the world, or
2. Go-to-market business strategy and product development methodology.

It can become really awkward when you try to use open source for both. The tension can be unbearable when what the business needs is at odds with what some random person in the community wants. You can still have a healthy open source community as long as you are forthright about the business direction (and the community remains in alignment with this direction).

Money isn’t evil

Users paying you money is a good thing. And more money is a better thing. My favorite video to point people to is Jason Cohen’s “Building the Perfect Bootstrapped Business on WordPress”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_CmkUT25BE

In this video, Jason describes a viable SaaS business as $10k MRR. Here are a couple ways you can get to $10k MRR:

• Charge 1,000 users $10/month.
• Charge 100 users $100/month.

Acquiring new customers is hard. It’s much easier to grow revenue by charging more (obviously easier said than done). Right now, Monica charges me $45/year. As a professional user, Monica is easily worth twice that to me — much closer to what I pay for other recurring SaaS services (e.g. Harvest, DeployHQ, etc.). And if I were a business user (multiple users sharing the same contact database), then Monica should charge me per seat.

Business users already have dozens of CRMs to choose from though. For professional users, Monica could be the antidote to LinkedIn.

Pick your audience

Monetizing open source is very, very hard. It’s important to decide whether you’re:

1. Trying to monetize your existing open source audience, or
2. Marketing to some other audience completely unaffiliated with the open source project.

I think the latter could lend itself to a more sustainable business because you aren’t competing with free.

With a polished iOS app (again, easier said than done), Monica could open up a greenfield customer acquisition channel. Alternatively, there may be some SMB use cases that Monica could market against (e.g. any business needing to automate ongoing relationship management).

Importantly, growing the business is more than simply building new features, and requires commitment accordingly.

Overall, Thinking in Bets is a pretty middle of the road business book. It’s good for lots of tactical details around “thinking in bets” and avoiding inherent biases. It doesn’t have an overly compelling narrative.

Some of its more salient points include:

• “Resulting” is judging a decision based on its results (which are probabilistic) instead of the thinking and process leading to the decision. A good decision can always have a bad outcome because no decision is ever 100% predictable.
• Transforming “I know” into “I think with N% certainty” creates space for evaluating what you think you know that led to your current conclusion. It also creates space for others to critically examine the facts leading to your conclusion without you being “wrong”.
• Sugar industry funded research that eventually triggered low-fat food products. Took decades of real-world impact to realize the flaws. See Snackwell opinions from Michael Pollan.
• Separate the message from the messenger to avoid bias based on perception of messenger. For instance, liberals could learn a lot from conservatives this way. Tactically, practice this by removing the name from the statement and evaluate more objectively.
• Remembering the future is the best way to plan for it. From the vantage point of the present, it’s hard to see beyond the next step. We end up over planning for addressing problems we have right now. When we work backward from the goal, we plan the decision tree in greater depth.

Overall, Thinking in Bets provides useful reference material for “thinking in bets.” Which is the title of the book. Which you don’t really understand the meaning of unless you’re a poker player or read the book.

1. How This All Happened (Morgan Housel) — History of the American economy since WW2, explaining consumerism, consumer debt, and the rise of financial inequality.
2. Relentless: How One Guy Brought the Internet to America’s Schools (Without Fail) — The right way to be rich is to use your privilege to work on harder and harder problems.
3. Creating Surplus (Fred Wilson) — Useful chart depicting which goods/services have gotten cheaper because of technology, and which have gotten more expensive in the same period.
4. Could Oregon Become the First State to Ban Single-Family Zoning? (Willamette Week) — State legislation is becoming a possibility.

I definitely feel older this year. Not yet in the “my body is aging” sense, but in the “I am definitely not a kid anymore” sense. I am acutely aware of all the responsibilities I hold as a father and husband (and homeowner, for that matter). This post is a couple days late accordingly.

Family life

We are fully assimilated into the routine:

• Leah works Mondays and Wednesdays, so I watch the kids until 8 am and then take them to daycare up the street.

• On the good days, I’ll land in my shedquarters and start working. On the really bad days, I don’t make it off the couch for a while.

• When Leah is at work, I’ll pick up the kids around 4:45 pm and then start making dinner. We eat, we putz around the house, we put the kids to bed, we read for a bit, and then we go to sleep.

One of our life hacks is to meal plan at least a week out, and sometimes two. Not only does this reduce my trips to Costco and Fred Meyer, but it empowers us to live vicariously through food. A couple of recipes on regular weeknight rotation include Spinach, Chickpea, and Tomato Curry from Fresh India and 20-Minute Turkey Chili.

We also loved our CSA share from Our Table, a neat cooperative farm roughly 10 minutes from our house. Every week yielded a diversity of vegetables that inspired us to try new flavors and recipes.

To break the grind in 2018, we focused on enjoying the Pacific Northwest:

• Two week road-trip to Joseph, Boise, and Stanley.

• Victoria, BC twice. First to visit Leah’s Grandpa, Charlie, because we knew he didn’t have long, and then second to attend his memorial.

• Down to the beautiful McKenzie River a couple times to visit Leah’s mom. Ava caught her first steelhead in August.

• Hood River and Astoria for Jane’s and Johanna’s weddings, respectively.

• Sunriver and the beach a few times a piece. The most fun beach trip was a weekend getaway for my birthday.

As of this writing, Ava is 4 1/2 (eagerly awaiting her 5th birthday) and Charlie just turned three. Ava loves craft projects right now. She’s regularly drawing, making necklaces, or just cutting stuff out and gluing it together. Charlie is increasingly articulate — both a conversationalist and a joker. Watching both of their personalities develop is a total joy.

Professionally-speaking

On the consulting front, 2018 was my best financial year yet.

Hitting this milestone was the result of 60 hours/week for 9 straight weeks. Imagine waking up at 4 am, leading three separate projects with Indian engineering teams, then load balancing against a variety of other projects throughout the day, and finally wrapping up around 8 pm. Needless to say, I was pretty burned out at the end of it.

Next Tuesday, January 8th, I’m starting a full-time job! I’m really looking forward to working with my new team, and the new learning opportunities presented in the role. It’s also been wonderful to have a couple weeks of downtime to reset.

Over the course of 2018, I volunteered a total of 116 hours towards open source. During the first half of the year, I helped out with WordCamp for Publishers as a speaker/workshop organizer. Many thanks to Steph and Adam for their roles in wrangling a great event. In the second half of the year, I took on the role of REST API Release Lead for WordPress 5.0. I’m really proud of those who supported the efforts, and am happy that I was able to make a substantive contribution to the project.

Quantified self

According to Goodreads, I read 39 books over the year (with an original goal of 25). Of this set, my favorites were:

• Buy Then Build. All about “acquisition entrepreneurship” and associated tactics. Creating a new business from scratch is for suckers. I’m sold.

• Lost and Founder. Rand Fishkin’s highly engaging telling of his relationship with Moz (his company) and the associated ups and downs. One of the most honest startup narratives I’ve read.

• Sourdough. I am Lois and I love sourdough.

• Principles. Superb strategies delivered with great clarity. Ignore the parts that may seem annoying, because the book will transition back to immensely practical detail.

• Pachinko. If you don’t know much about the history between the Koreas and Japan, Pachinko is a great entry point.

Special shout out to John Scalzi. I read from a few of his series this year: The Interdependency, Old Man’s War, and Lock In. All of his writing is delightful. If you like science fiction at all, I’d highly recommend John Scalzi’s books.

According to Strava, I ran 1,056.6 miles in 167 runs (average of 6.33 miles). I only biked 208.7 miles in 25 rides though. My favorite run was probably the Spray Rodeo half marathon, where I managed a 8:16/mile pace and 7:23 for the last mile.

According to TripIt, I traveled 43,325 miles in 58 days on 12 trips. India was my furthest destination. I also went to Salt Lake City, New York, Austin, Las Vegas, Chicago, and Nashville for a variety of work-related events. Notably, the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Twilight River Cruise is pretty darn amazing on a clear night. I’m not one for tourist activities but I was highly impressed.

2019

Goals are what I like to think about doing until something more interesting comes along. A few ideas on my mind include:

• Buying an online business doing $2-5k MRR (something I can run on the side).

• Trying out the Unitarian Church with Leah and the kids.

• Figuring out how I can get on the Tualatin River more often (canoe, kayak, or rowing skiff) because it’s so close to our house.

Initial setup

Historically, Dropbox is always the first thing I install. Up until October, Dropbox contained pretty much my entire filesystem (except applications and working projects), so this first step feels like my laptop is healing itself.

But, and can you believe, I’ve switched away from Dropbox. I had a hunch that Dropbox’s filesystem monitoring daemon was consuming all of my battery — and it was! Now, as long as I keep Slack closed too, my battery lasts for hours.

My new Dropbox-equivalent setup is:

• 1Password iCloud sync instead of Dropbox sync.
• iCloud Drive for the files I want to make accessible on other devices.
• Backblaze for daily backups (which I had been using in addition to Dropbox).
• Google Drive for the files Leah and I share.

Desktop applications

Getting 1Password is up and running is always the hard requirement for configuring everything else. 1Password literally unlocks the rest of my life.

For personal task management, I use Things 3. It is my sword; without Things, I’d be defenseless. I could write a whole soliloquy about task management if I knew what a soliloquy was. In October, I bit the bullet and upgraded from Things 2 to Things 3. Dealing with the UI changes was rough few weeks, but we’re all good now.

Leah and I share 303 recipes across our computers and phones using Paprika. Paprika is a pretty solid, full-featured application. One nice feature, which is to be expected I suppose, is that it can import recipes from websites via their Schema.org markup. This makes it much easier to keep track of your new favorites.

I thought Zoom was over-hyped but it’s truly not. Zoom is really great video conferencing software: reliable, has all the features I need, and hasn’t succumbed to the bloat cycle yet. I am a proud paying customer. Let’s hope this lasts for several more years

Alfred is still the best quick launcher, but Spotlight was pretty good when I used it for a brief second. Dash has an amazing Alfred integration for WordPress, WP-CLI, JavaScript and PHP developer documentation.

For email, I still use Mailplane. Mailplane is the Gmail web app embedded in a desktop app, and the right balance between them both. Yes, I could use Fluid or something else, but Mailplane has enough enhancements that makes it totally worth it.

In October, I switched from Simplenote to Apple Notes. As silly as it sounds, I really wanted to be able to properly format unordered lists. Apple Notes supports formatting (even on mobile) while Simplenote is limited to whatever Markdown format you invent for yourself. To keep my Apple Notes tidy, I “Save as PDF” into an archive folder.

I also started using Ulysses for drafting blog posts but I don’t yet know if that will stick. This post was written in Gutenberg.

Lastly, some smaller utilities I use include:

• KeepingYouAwake - Keeps my screen awake.
• Bartender - Literally cannot believe menu bar management isn’t a core Mac OS feature.
• Clocks - Best way to keep track of the time in Mumbai, Melbourne, and Zurich.
• Annotate - All but abandoned but I haven’t found a better way to take screenshots.
• Licecap - Record GIFs with a somewhat clunky interface.
• Littleipsum - Placeholder text when you need it.
• Harvest - Still the very best way to track time. Absolutely indispensable.

Developer tools

Now for the good stuff.

I spend the majority of my day in Sublime Text 3 with the Cobalt2 theme and Adobe’s Source Code Pro font. I tried switching to Atom at one point but couldn’t do the HTML/CSS/JavaScript thing. Heck, I even tried vim for a few weeks back in the day. Cool idea, but productivity is king.

Sequel Pro is still the tried and true MySQL desktop app. It does everything I need it to.

To access my computer’s inner brain, I use iTerm2 with zsh and Oh My Zsh. My dotfiles are on GitHub. These Git aliases are the bee’s knees (notably gpo, gp, gco, and gc). My keystrokes into the terminal usually run:

• homebrew - The simplest way to install new utilities. Keeping them up to date is another matter. I always cross my fingers when running brew upgrade.
• Laravel Valet - I’ve switched away from Vagrant in favor of running Nginx, PHP, and MySQL directly on my filesystem. It’s very fast.
• WP-CLI - Duh!
• cgr - Preferred alternative to composer global require as it mitigates the dependency hell of the latter.
• autojump - Forever props to Nikolay. If you’re still using cd, you’re doing it wrong.
• hub - See my Git aliases. A new pull request is as simple as gpr.

That’s about it! If I’m missing out on any software you love, let me know in the comments.

Pictured on the left: yet another brand new, fully-loaded 13" MacBook Pro. This time it’s a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7 with 16 GB and a 500 GB SSD. On the right is my mid-2014 13" MBP, quite possibly the best computer I’ve ever owned. RIP all of my awesome stickers.

And, with that being said, the new MBP on the left is surprisingly not awful. I put the upgrade off for quite a while because of the reported keyboard issues. My experience thus far is pleasantly the opposite; I find the keyboard quite good and enjoyable to use. I’ll need to track down a wired secondary keyboard that offers an equivalent experience.

Previously: 2014, 2011.

WordPress is known for its commitment to backwards compatibility. It prides itself on functional consistency between major releases, and makes sure actions and filters continue to work as expected.

Gutenberg is big and huge and a significant change for the better. Contributors are working to make Gutenberg as backwards-compatible as possible. However, the reality is that we’ll likely taste three flavors:

1. It continues to work as expected. For example, an enter_title_here filter continues to modify the title placeholder text in Gutenberg. Similarly, Post Type Supports is still the API for defining which features a Post Type supports.

2. It doesn’t work but there’s an equivalent alternative. Some of WordPress’ existing architecture doesn’t translate directly into Gutenberg. For instance, media_buttons is the old paradigm for registering a button to insert something into the post content. In Gutenberg, Blocks are the new paradigm. Blocks are added to the post content via the Inserter.

3. It doesn’t work at all. We want to avoid this as much as possible, but there will be some elements you can customize in the Classic Editor that you simply can’t change in Gutenberg.

The Gutenberg Migration Guide documents many of these specifics. New contributions are always welcome. Generally, compatibility solutions are organically prioritized against identified need, expected impact, and level of effort/possibility.

Ultimately, WordPress remains committed to the ethos of backwards compatibility, even when undertaking such a transformational change as Gutenberg. An amazing amount of effort is going into ensuring WordPress sites continue to work as expected. It’s important to acknowledge, though, that backwards compatibility is fundamentally more difficult than the past. The reality has a certain degree of nuance.

To the many commits to come!

She thought open source, both software and methodology, might be a solution to make small and medium-size businesses more competitive. However, I argued the exact opposite: open source is a business strategy for an extreme form of taking the entire market.

I think one root cause of large companies growing larger is that technology lends itself to extreme operational efficiencies. With a technology company, the marginal cost of an additional customer is effectively zero. If Amazon can operate at 10x global scale with the same operational costs, it can take a smaller margin and still be very competitive. Traditional businesses can’t compete if they have a larger percentage of margin dedicated to operational costs.

So, if it’s true that more of the market is going to larger companies, is this worth solving for? And what are potential solutions? One result of current market dynamics is difficult to unwind: Amazon yields amazing customer value and worsening employment options (either by destroying jobs entirely or offering poorer wages).

• Smoked pork soup
• Garlic brown sugar glazed salmon
• Smoked tri-tip steak (omg so good)
• Cinnamon raisin swirl walnut sourdough
• Regular sourdough
• Ugandan eggs bread with tomato chutney
• Turkey meatballs with homemade pasta
• Black bean brownies
• Dried apples and pears from our trees

Great start to the fall! Cooking is the best form of humblebrag.

Our first stop was Joseph, where we stayed for four nights (VRBO). If you’ve ever been to Jackson Hole, Joseph is a much earlier version of it: gorgeous mountains, one touristy main street, and a bunch of farmland otherwise.

One fun adventure was the Joseph Railriders. Invented by a bike shop in La Grande, they designed two- and four-seat pedal carts that sit on top of train tracks. It’s a great re-use of abandoned railroad. Ava and Charlie got a total kick out of our two hour trip to Enterprise and back.

We also got the kids out on kayaks for the first time at Wallowa Lake. It was so peaceful Charlie passed out in my lap. If it looks like the back of the kayak is sinking, that’s because it is.

A few other highlights from Joseph include: Mexican food at La Laguna, where Jose’s hospitality was world-class; meeting Brian Kausler and his family at Joseph City Park; and dinner at Terminal Gravity in Enterprise where, without a doubt, Charlie fell into the creek.

After Joseph, we drove to Boise and stayed three nights pretty close-in to downtown (AirBnb). If we were to move anywhere else, Boise would be it:

• The climate is everything we love about Central Oregon.
• North End has great neighborhoods, and is generally within walking distance of downtown.
• The foothills have hundreds of miles of maintained trails within a 5-15 minute drive.
• The Greenbelt is a wonderful bike trail that circumnavigates most of Boise.

We loved every moment of it. And yet, we’ll be staying in Tualatin. Boise already has a huge influx of new residents, so I think it’s bound to go through some growing pains over the next 5-10 years.

The last stop, and the original inspiration for the trip, was Stanley, Idaho. Our family friends have a beautiful cabin they graciously let my entire family use as our base camp for adventure. We did a good amount of hiking, enjoyed the wonderful scenery, and filled our bellies with delicious food.

1. How to Bootstrap Your Way to $250,000,000/year with JT Marino of Tuft & Needle (Indie Hackers) — Epic story of a superbly-executed startup. Underscores the value of studying existing tactical best practices to avoid learning lessons the hard way.

2. Is Strong Towns the same as Sprawl Repair? (Chuck Marohn) — Canonical explanation of why suburban retrofit is an optimistic yet unobtainable goal. Best case scenario is that some subdivisions can incrementally transform towards more traditional, mixed-use neighborhoods.

3. pup: Command Line HTML Parsing — Like jq, but for HTML. Query the DOM with CSS selectors. (via Joseph Scott)

4. A glimpse into the dark underbelly of cryptocurrency markets (Nic Carter) — Guilty until proven innocent: cryptocurrencies are pump and dump schemes. If you don’t know what a pump and dump scheme is, you especially shouldn’t be buying cryptocurrencies.

Most recently, I enjoyed “The Hysterical Campus” in Quillette and Sam Harris’ interview with Yuval Noah Harari. And, if you want more of the  backstory on Quillette, listen to Tyler Cohen’s interview with Quillette founder Claire Lehmann.

With an email newsletter, the writer has reasonable confidence their work is delivered to a known audience. With a blog, the best the writer has are comments and Twitter, both which are totally broken.

There should be better tools for the writer to publish to a specific audience (say, <50 people), for the audience to receive the work through their preferred means (e.g. email at the end of the day vs. RSS), and for both to engage in a productive dialogue that evolves over time.

Oh, and one more important piece: a “Start Here” point of entry for those new to the conversation, so they can painlessly get up to speed.

Also featured in today’s Bridgeliner.

Leah and I had a great weekend getaway for my birthday: hiking Neahkahnie, checking out Oregon Coast Rail Riders up the Nehalem river, hiking Bayocean Spit, and grilling steak while drinking an entire bottle of rosé.

Can’t wait for the next one!

Tualatin’s housing shortage is only one piece of a broader regional problem. Like many complex social challenges, there aren’t any “silver bullets” — answers that will fix everything at once. Fortunately, there are many policy makers, researchers, and community members working together to identify strategies that can begin to provide more housing options.

This past Monday, Tualatin’s Business Advocacy Council invited Michael Andersen (@andersem), Senior Fellow at the Sightline Institute, to present on the topic of housing in Tualatin. Although Michael isn’t an expert on Tualatin specifically, he contextualized our local housing shortages with the economic trends of Washington County, and then identified the solutions other cities are already applying.

Watch Michael’s presentation embedded above or on Vimeo. There was a good Q&A session too but the video for that was incomplete. You can also read the (machine-generated) full transcript below. Thanks to Joseph Konty for video recording and Tim Garrett at Matchlight Video for post-production work.

If you’d like to learn more about missing-middle housing / residential infill, including its associated practical and social challenges, listen to this Think Out Loud interview with Michael Andersen and Portland city planner Joe Zehnder.

Thanks for inviting me here everybody. Thanks Daniel. That was wonderful. So, like they said, Daniel and Linda invited me here to talk a little bit about my favorite subject, housing; how we can pay less for it, how your employees, colleagues, co-workers, neighbors can pay less for it and hopefully having more of it the right places can lead to a stronger economy and better quality of life here in Tualatin.

Like Daniel made clear, I think, I’m not an expert on Tualatin. I’ve been here but I don’t know the community nearly as well as any of you do. I know about the region and the regional situation; I’ll be trying to bring some wisdom from around the region that you can figure out how it fits into your community, obviously. And I’ll talk just briefly about where I’m coming from in this: I’m a policy writer and researcher, and I focus mostly on housing affordability.

The Sightline Institute is a regional sustainability think tank is notable for understanding that economics are a thing. We are focused on this area of the Pacific Northwest as our bio-region is the, arguably, most physically abundant part of the richest society in the history of the world.  If we can’t figure out a way to make our current prosperity sustainable, indefinitely, in this area, then we can’t figure out anywhere. So we think about what is in the way of that happening.

We have as a three part way of thinking about that all. Going through the first, our economy depends on working ecosystem here in Oregon, as everywhere, and our ecosystem depends on efficient cities and towns.

That’s: space-efficient, energy-efficient, economically efficient. On that last note, our economically-efficient cities are depending on a fair and productive economy. We need to be able to do as much as we can in these cities to help everybody’s lives improve.

This is a three part stool. We need every part of that circle to work and they all feed into one another. So I’ll be trying to talk about ways that they can all mutually reinforce.

On that note, I want to talk about a problem that Tualatin has. This is not going be news to any of you but I’m going to run through a few of the statistics that hopefully capture where things are at. The median monthly rent is up $76 in the most recent year data. That was 2016, a little bit ago, but that’s the equivalent of a $912/year tax hike, if you’re a homeowner for example. It looks like a property tax hike that you never get any additional services for. We were talking about one every dollar you pay you want to get out of; from a tenant’s perspective, they got nothing out of that. And, if the tenants and renters in your life have been pissed off, that’s why.

Meanwhile home seekers, as we heard from Daniel, have also been struggling. Median home prices are up 13% last year to $464,000. That translates to $115,000 up since 2008. 33% percent increase and comes out to, if we some simple math, 10% down payment with much higher interest rate than anyone would want to pay. They need to get $46,000 down which most people aren’t going to have, especially when they’re a first time home buyer.

Meanwhile, this is part of a larger situation in Washington County. I think there are a lot of ways to think about what the cause of this problem is. But the simplest way to think about it, probably, is that in Washington County we’ve added 82,000 new jobs since 2000, which is fantastic, and we’ve added 48,000 new homes since 2000.

Over the course of two business cycles, job growth has been 37 percent faster than housing growth. So that is a problem, in as much as the people who need to work in these jobs, who are creating these jobs, who are making these jobs exist by their presence, are coming in not from homes they’re being in Washington County, but from elsewhere.

And of course this is what that looks like. So people are spending more and more time, as we heard, to get to these jobs.

We can even put numbers on it.

The red lines in this picture are higher income $40,000+ per household. The pink lines are commutes to the census tract we’re standing in right now for people making less than $40,000 per household.

You see people are coming from a long way away, some of them without very much financial reward for doing but they’re making it work because they are a bunch of good jobs here in Tualatin. The cost of those commuting, of course, is borne by everybody who is trying to use the roads including the freight and the rest of the economy in general.

So what that translates into is that in addition to its specific housing problem, it is becoming a larger economic problem in Tualatin. That manifests in the form of a 2.7% unemployment rate and a series of job recruits that, as we heard from Linda, are hesitant to commute for more the 45 minutes in one direction. And the result of that is that good jobs are going unfilled.

You could solve the problem as employers have tried do by paying more money than ever. And then you’d, of course, have to charge more for whatever you’re selling. But everybody would be happier if you could pay people the same money you want to pay them right now and they would be happy to accept that wage because they wouldn’t have to drive 90 minutes in a car every day.

How do you get to that situation? Well, I’ll be talking about this for the rest of the presentation.

I also want to keep in mind, as one of the folks mentioned, that we have 400 local high schoolers graduating every year from the high school here. Some of them are going out to get great skills and great schools. Some of them want to stay in the community and work here. Whatever the case, if any of them ever want to live in Tualatin and be a home buyer in the area, they’re not going to have $46,000 to do it in the beginning of their career. Unless they have some financial connection or whatever, in which case there’s a whole other problem to work out.

The solution to all this trouble we’ve thought about a lot at the Sightline Institute, and our basic conclusion is that there are a lot of things you can do but the single most important thing you need to do is you need to have more homes. It is ultimately about having enough homes to go around. That is was going to prevent the number of people chasing homes from driving the price way way up. Especially in job-rich areas like Tualatin is lucky to be.

So how do we get more housing? We thought about that too. We have done some math about what that looks like. It’s a complicated process of course, but the calculation is ultimately not that difficult to wrap your head around.

If this is the number of homes that can make money, you can make money by building this many homes. And if you can reduce the cost of building that many homes, then you will be able to more homes for the same amount of money. So ultimately it comes down to cost control. You can get more homes for the same amount of private investment being available if you can reduce the cost of developing homes.

So then the question becomes: how do we get more homes and make them less expensive to build? How do we get them less expensive to build? There are a few ways to do that.

We can have lower fees and faster regulatory review. Some of you may be familiar with this website launched recently, Affordable Oregon. It’s a fellow in Washington County who has tried to compile some new and useful information comparing all jurisdictions in the area to one another, and how much they’re putting these in regulatory review together. His belief is that drives up the price of housing. He is completely right. Fees and regulatory review definitely drive up the price of housing and, without wanting to endorse his specific conclusions, that is a place you can go for information about what’s going here.

There are also a couple other factors we can talk about given the price of housing. Lowering the construction cost per home, and lowering the land cost per home. There are various ways to do this but I’m going to focus on these last two, for the simple reason that other people are talking a lot about this, I think, and also there is a very clear political and social tradeoff involved in these fee and regulatory review.

Absolutely, we should be minimizing fees but that revenue is basically being used to replace tax revenue that is not collected from the property tax cap which was passed in the 1990s and ultimately a $1 less is public revenue is going to result in less services at some point. So despite the need for efficiency, there’s a pretty powerful trade-off.

Similarly, with regulations, every regulation that exists is there somebody asked for it to be there. So that’s a difficult needle to thread.

Meanwhile, if we can come up with ways that are politically acceptable and safe to reduce these things, that’s sort of a pure win. We can get more economic activity, more prosperity, more housing for every dollar, if we can reduce those things.

Let’s look at the cost of those things. This is the rent for a recently built home in the Portland metro area in various housing types. Here’s a freestanding suburban house, two store garden apartments, five story urban apartment building, and a high rise apartment building like what you might see in downtown Portland. This is per three bedroom home for recently built rentals.

As you can see, there is sort of a U shape in these costs. What’s contributing to the cost here are these two types have lower construction costs per square foot mostly because they’re built with wood (the freestanding suburban homes and the two story apartment buildings).

The next three types have lower land costs per home because more households are sharing the same amount of land in higher buildings. High rise apartments are built with steel so they’re much more expensive per square foot to build.

None of this is to say that we should only be building like the cheapest kind. There’s a completely legitimate reason for someone to prefer each of these different items. Different people will want to live in each of these different settings.

The problem is not that we are telling people they have to live… We don’t want to tell people they have to live in cheap housing, we want to give them the option to live in that cheap housing if they want to. If somebody wants to live in a two story garden apartment, and they’re not able to because we aren’t building or offering enough of those options, then we are leaving housing on the table. That is housing that could exist but is not. Something that someone would be willing to pay less money to live in if they had the option to.

So this two-story garden apartment scenario I’m going to talk about for a few minutes… it’s part of an idea from the last few years called “missing middle”. If we think of housing on a spectrum, from detached single family housing you see in cities everywhere to mid-rise housing, like four to six stories you might see in the central area. You’ve also got duplexes triplexes, fourplexes, courtyard apartments, townhomes, a whole array of things that have been common historically in cities everywhere, but aren’t really provided for in very many locations in modern zoning.

This is my friend Max’s place. His place demonstrates that this is not a new idea, this is a forgotten idea.

The reason he can live in this nice neighborhood in central Portland on a corner lot like this is that he shares a lot that could house one household with three households. This is a four-plex. He works at a retail store and that’s what makes it possible for him to be my neighbor.

Looking specifically at Tualatin, if we see the yellow areas, here are housing, the blue is manufacturing, the pink is commercial city center.

Think about how much of the land a place like Max’s would be able to be built on or would be illegal to build a place like that today. It’s just the red areas here, the sort of medium density housing areas. It’s not a lot of land as a share of everything that we’ve put together in a city where you’re allowed to build those.

If we assume we want to build more of these things, or at least we want to allow them to be built if people want to live in them in more areas, we have a few options. We could expand the amount of city that has this middle size housing; we could ensure that new areas that are brought inside the Urban Growth Boundary have a higher-ratio of that middle-sized, middle-density housing. We want to consider whether it is possible to get these missing-middle housing into the lower density zones in a way that doesn’t fundamentally change those zones, and people won’t object to the transformation of the neighborhood in a way that is moving too fast.

Is there a way to find missing-middle housing options for these lower-density zones? I think this is one of the important ways to think about this thing.

There are a lot of cities around the region considering new ways to do that. For the last part presentation I’m going to share a few ways that they’re accomplishing that goal.

We’ve got the accessory dwelling unit; the backyard cottage, the mother-in-law unit you might call it. It’s a great place for your mom-in-law to live or your father-in-law or your cousins or a young couple that you know or just somebody who is gonna help you pay the rent and a mortgage on your larger building.

These are usually no more than 800 square feet and they were recently legalised in Tualatin. We’ll talk more about reasons why more action might be needed in a few minutes

This is another example of ADU. This is from Kol Peterson is a sort of expert on ADUs as they’ve been taking off in popularity the last few years. He’s based in Portland and has a book about it. He has an example of a two-car garage he worked a few months ago and converted it to a 815 square foot home for about $100,000 including $25,000 of his own labor and time. It is possible to get pretty extraordinary things done for not very much money when you can reuse existing spaces for housing units.

This is more for the context of new areas that are brought into an urban area: cottage clusters.

For example, you would say that, instead of only allowing a house to be 3,600 square foot house on a lot, you could also say you get the option of building three 1,200 square foot houses, or three 1,000 square foot houses with a shared rec room for the kids to play in. It’s not going to be for everybody, but making that an option is a way to get more use out of less land for a lower cost. And also creating the type of housing a lot of people were looking for and unable to find because of the economics of development land use in the area.

This is a modern duplex. A familiar idea, I just took picture of one I like.

This is a four-plex. This is an old Victorian home built in 1949, I think, in Portland. This is Garland and his wife. He’s the developer of this new place; this is their first project. They took one home, sliced it into four floors so the first floor is fully disability-accessible, of course. The top floor has a terrific view

They can get a lot of use out of a single structure because they’re allowed to put more than one home in it.

The last thing I want to say, the last point I want to make and leave you with here, is that, in addition to legalizing any of these options, if we want them to happen, we need them to be economically viable. The useful thing about Bellingham, they legalize ADUs in 1995 and since 1995 they’ve only built, on average, four per year in the whole city for these backyard cottages. Why is that?

It’s because they put a bunch of rules on their use and construction. I’m going to focus on one of these (these are a few of them): the last one, off-street parking requirement. This is probably the biggest reason why they haven’t had any more of them constructed in the last few years.

This is a quote from the regulatory document recommending how cities in Oregon should legalise ADUs if they want them to be built. As they say accurately, it’s one of the biggest obstacles to having anybody actually construct these homes.

That’s just one example, here’s some other specific things we can do. We could up-zone to three-story areas to four-story areas if people are not building new apartments on a given lot. The reason is that they cannot make money by doing so and the simplest thing to do is just let them build more homes, if that’s politically viable.

We could reclassify homes like Max’s from a commercial lot. Right now, if someone wants to build a new four unit building, that is subject to the same regulatory standards and processes and building requirements as a two hundred apartment building in downtown Portland. We could decide we want to regulate them more like a duplex and hold that same building standards. Or we could create a new intermediate standard of building and bring down the cost of developing those three or four-plex homes.

We can legalize internal divisions of homes over 10 years or 50 years, whatever we want. Just to say that this house has served its purpose, it has some architectural value, maybe, and we want to keep it viable by letting it do new things as it gets older.

These are just a few examples of possible actions and I’m hoping that we can spend what would ordinarily be a Q&A session to talk about your perspectives on what actions we can take and what is needed. That’s all I’ve got to say

And have we been fixing blockers! A non-exhaustive list includes:

• Adding images to a post doesn’t also attach it

• Editing cases a huge number of revisions

• Category, tag, and taxonomy controls don’t respect the correct capabilities

• REST API: Attachments controller should respect “Max upload file size” and “Site upload space” in multisite (WordPress 4.9.8)

• Convert to Blocks not properly converting successive shortcodes (Gutenberg v3.3)

• New lines in shortcode content are ignored (Gutenberg v3.3)

The two remaining problems that cause me the most hesitation are:

1. Unexpected content changes toggling Classic editor from Text to Visual to Text - When post content includes blocks (i.e. you’re opening a Gutenberg post in the Classic Editor), TinyMCE can mangle the blocks within the post. The solution is TBD; needs additional research.
2. Gutenberg breaks “classic” posts w/ shortcodes by carelessly wrapping shortcodes into paragraph tags - This was partially fixed by correctly handling multi-line shortcodes in a block conversion. However, these multi-line shortcodes still end up with paragraph tags around them. The current suggestion to explore is running wpautop() and shortcode_unautop() on the server instead of TinyMCE.

If you’d like to save a point of reference, I have a working GitHub issue documenting these two and some other issues around block conversion, tables, and galleries. Help appreciated!

Friday night: solo parent at Justin (my cousin) and Justine’s wedding. Charlie was one of three ring bearers, and Ava one of nine flower girls. Ton of fun getting to spend so much time with my kids.

Saturday night: kid-free at Jane and George’s wedding. Leah gave a wonderful maid of honor speech. Much debauchery followed this picture.

Next up: Maggie’s wedding in August!

1. Waking Up Podcast #130 - Universal Basic Income (Sam Harris with Andrew Yang) — Best possible explanation of the underlying economic forces justifying UBI.

2. Ways to think about machine learning (Benedict Evans) — Imagine what you could do with a million ten year-olds.

3. Univision Is A Fucking Mess (Special Projects Desk) — Colorful post-mortem of what went down with Fusion. Previously.

4. A primer on fentanyl(s) (Mark Kleiman) — Comprehensive yet approachable overview to the history and current policy implications.

Our vacation in Sunriver last weekend was far too short. I climbed the cinder cone twice, once with a Burley and once without. Ava took her first bike ride to the marina. And we regained all of our calories from ice cream at Goody’s.

Looking for something to do at Contributor Day? We could use your help!

The Gutenberg Migration Guide is a crowdsourcing project to document WordPress Classic Editor customization points and their Gutenberg equivalents (if such exist). media_buttons is the quintessential example; whereas you might’ve used this action previously in the Classic Editor to register a button, it no longer exists in Gutenberg and the block inserter is its direct equivalent.

We want the migration guide to be as comprehensive as it can be. This is defined as:

1. Identifying as many integration points as we can find. For instance, there are already 14 actions / filters listed. Some are commonly used, while others are not. As long as we have a good example for how the integration point is used, it makes sense to include in the guide.

2. Whenever possible, documenting how feature parity can be achieved with Gutenberg. Some integration points do already have Gutenberg equivalents. Others don’t yet, and that’s alright.

You can help make the migration guide more comprehensive. If you don’t have any examples of your own to include, here are a couple of places you can start looking:

• Our plugin compatibility database has a good number of plugins marked incompatible. Some even have descriptions of the problems!

• The [Type] Plugin / Theme Interoperability and Backwards Compatibility labels in the Gutenberg GitHub repository have some number of reasonably documented conflicts.

Everyone can contribute to the migration guide, regardless of skill set. All you need to do is open a new GitHub issue and report the incompatibility you’ve found. Screenshots and GIFs are tremendously helpful. If you know the underlying problem, then please include that too. If all you know is that a given plugin’s feature doesn’t work in Gutenberg, no worries; simply open an issue and we can help track down the cause. Identifying examples of breakage are what we need help with most.

Feel free to join #hosting-community in the WordPress.org Slack if you have any questions, etc. Thanks for your help!

• Persist custom CSS classes during block conversion when block supports additional classes
  When a WordPress user converts existing HTML to a block, or manually edits the block HTML to include a class, we should persist their custom CSS class into the additional classes field.

• Autosaving somehow triggers a full save when metaboxes exist, causing too many revisions
  Gutenberg 3.0 included a bunch of new autosave functionality that still needs some work. Track down this bug before Adam Silverstein does!

• Drag and drop uploading should respect WordPress multisite max upload size
  We need to make sure file size is validated both client-side and server-side. Felix Arntz started a patch for core that we’ll want to land in Gutenberg first.

Read through the contributing guide for details on how to get started. Feel free to ask questions on the specific issue, or join us in the #core-editor channel with any questions you might have.

• Board the plane last, to maximize your use of airport wifi and minimize sitting in the plane seat.

• Walk everywhere you can, because you’re probably sitting otherwise. If the opportunity comes up to walk two miles to your next destination, take it without hesitation.

• Drink water at every opportunity. You are more likely to get dehydrated while traveling, and dehydration can ruin your trip.

• Minimize alcohol and sugar consumption. The golden amount is zero / zero. If you need to consume one, you’ll probably want alcohol for the social occasions over sugar.

• TSA Pre is the easiest way to not hate the airport. I’m typically through a security checkpoint in under two minutes.

• Bring lunch from home for your first day of travel. If possible, also bring non-perishable snacks from home for throughout the trip.

On Saturday, I ran the Spray Half to the tune of 1:48:22.

It was a great event and I was really happy with my performance. Notably, I hit faster and faster splits in the last five miles: 8:19 (mile 9), 8:02 (mile 10), 7:44 (mile 11), 7:51 (mile 12), and 7:23 (mile 13).

We left Spray on Sunday but we weren’t done yet.

On Monday, Leah and I subjected Ava and Charlie to a grueling ~14 mile hike around Timothy Lake.

For better or for worse, this is the epitome of our marriage — “should we turn around now?” is left unanswered and we keep going. Fortunately, our kids are more hardcore than we are.

An A+ Memorial Day weekend for the year in review book.

Dear Commissioners,

Thank you for the work you do.

My name is Daniel Bachhuber. I’m a long time resident of Tualatin, born and raised in Fox Hills and now raising my own family near Jurgens Park. I’m here tonight, instead of at home with my wife and kids, because I’m concerned about our city’s lack of attention to the housing crisis. If it’s not something we address proactively, it will become a significant problem that will ultimately impact my family’s long-term wellbeing, and my property’s long-term value.

As it relates to tonight’s meeting, I have two points I’d like to include in the public record.

First, the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development issued technical guidance for Oregon Senate Bill 1051, which is absent from the Staff Report. I’ve brought three copies for your reference. Notably, the technical guidance states:

• “Requiring off‐street parking is one of the biggest barriers to developing ADUs and it is recommended that jurisdictions not include an off‐street parking requirement in their ADU standards.”
• Also: “So that lot coverage requirements do not preclude ADUs from being built on smaller lots, local governments should review their lot coverage standards to make sure they don’t create a barrier to development.”

Second, the Staff Report Executive Summary states: the local regulations for ADU’s must be clear and objective to make it easier to build ADU’s.

However the Staff Report does not include any data on the total number of single family dwellings with three or more off-street parking slots (the minimum required for an ADU under proposed regulations), nor does it include data on the number of lots that have sufficient space for a detached ADU with current setbacks. Based on the information provided, it appears the proposed development code does not fulfill the spirit of Senate Bill 1051 and even contradicts the statement in the Executive Summary.

ADUs are an accessible, under-appreciated housing option. They can increase housing availability while also fitting within and preserving the aesthetic of the neighborhood. For a downsizing senior, building and living an interior ADU may be a way to stay in their home while earning cash from the larger part of their house. For a younger couple, building and renting out an interior ADU may permit them to afford housing closer to work.

I strongly encourage you to use the development code changes to promote, not hamper, ADUs as one part of the solution to the housing crisis.

“Accessory Dwelling Unit”, or ADU for short, is a broad label used for a variety of secondary living spaces on or in an existing primary residential property. They can be interior (e.g. converting an unnecessary bonus room) or detached (e.g. a small structure at the back of your house). If you built an ADU in this market, you could easily rent it out and make up to $1,000/month.

However, there is a caveat. Building an ADU in Tualatin is hampered by a single clause of the Tualatin Development Code: adding an ADU requires one off-street driveway spot, in addition to the two driveway spots required for the primary residence. Even though your neighbor can park five cars in their driveway and on the street, you can’t build an ADU at your house if it only has a two car driveway. According to Kol Peterson, author of Backdoor Revolution: The Definitive Guide to ADU Development, the off-street parking requirement is one of three “poison pill” regulations that significantly hamper ADU development.

Tualatin, like much of the Portland Metro area, has significant problems with housing affordability and availability. Buying a new house at $500,000 requires a family to save over $100,000 for the down payment, and then pay $2,400/month for mortgage and property tax. Rents have skyrocketed too: two bedroom apartments now start at $1,400/month. And this isn’t just a low-income problem. More and more in the community are feeling the financial stress of these costs.

ADUs are an under-appreciated housing option. They can increase housing availability while also fitting within and preserving the aesthetic of the neighborhood. They’re typically between 300 and 800 square feet, good for one or two people to live in. An interior ADU doesn’t typically require structural modifications, and its door is on the side or back of the house. Detached ADUs are usually located in the back of the house, with access along the side.

Picture your standard, single-family suburban house in Tualatin. Many houses are 2,000-3,000 square feet and have a bonus room over the garage. Other houses might have a basement, or a large-enough lot for a small structure in the backyard. Any of these spaces could be converted to an ADU. An ADU is simply a secondary, yet complete, living space (kitchen, bath, and bedroom) on the lot of a primary dwelling.

ADUs are also an accessible investment opportunity. For a downsizing senior, building and living an interior ADU may be a way to stay in their home earning cash from the larger part of their house. For a younger couple, building and renting out an interior ADU may permit them to afford closer housing to work than they otherwise could. And, for empty nesters, building an ADU could help their kids afford to start a family much closer to home.

Last August, Oregon passed Senate Bill 1051 which requires all cities to allow ADUs. While the specific definition of “allow” isn’t included in the bill, technical guidance from the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development strongly recommends dropping the off-street parking requirement. Cities that have already removed this requirement have seen a strong uptick in permitted ADUs.

Yet, even with this official recommendation, Tualatin has no plans to drop the off-street parking requirement from its Development Code. In fact, nearly all efforts to introduce more housing options are blocked by an upcoming, multi-year rewrite of the Tualatin Development Code.

There’s no silver bullet to the housing crisis. The dip in home building caused by the Great Recession is out of our control, as is the trend of people moving to Oregon. But, doing nothing and hoping the problem goes away will only cause more problems in the long-term. Instead, Tualatin would greatly benefit from taking the lead in exploring all potential housing options. While ADUs may be a drop in the bucket, they represent a ton of symbolic value in managing growth on our own terms.

Two upcoming opportunities to make your voice heard: the Planning Commission meeting tomorrow (Thursday) at 6:30 pm and the City Council meeting on Tuesday, May 29th at 7 pm. Both are at the Juanita Pohl Center.

1. ADU Legislative Initiatives Abound (Kol Peterson) — While Senate Bill 1051 is requires all cities to “allow ADUs”, the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development guidance recommends dropping owner occupancy requirements, dropping off street parking requirements, allowing detached ADUs up to 800 sq ft by right, and even allowing two ADUs.

2. ‘My Generation Is Never Going to Have That’ (POLITICO)— Pro-housing density efforts in Seattle from the affected tech population. See also Jeff Kaufman (Boston) and Kevin Burke (California).

3. Mickey Drexler and the death of a supply-driven world (Loose Threads) — Software eats retail: how J.Crew, Gap, Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel, and others were blindsided by technology.

4. Pedaling from Portland to Hood River (Bike Portland) — Neat 100 mile bike route off the beaten path.

On Tuesday, June 5th at 10 am PT, I’m heading up a webinar with Pantheon to cover how you can get your site ready. More specifically, we’ll cover:

• How to formulate a testing plan.

• Common Classic Editor customizations and their equivalents.

• What to keep an eye out for in the near future.

But wait, there’s more! The webinar is just one in a series of five, including Mel Choyce and Josh Pollock. You should sign up so Tessa and I aren’t terribly lonely on June 5th.

Since I last wrote two weeks ago, we’re making progress! Key achievements for Gutenberg and the REST API include:

• Support for who=authors was added to GET wp/v2/users, making it possible to accurately query for authors. WordPress, for better or for worse, defines an author as user_level!=0. See WordPress/gutenberg#6361 for the context on why we can’t add this logic client-side (#42202 for WordPress 4.9.6).
• Improved performance for the _fields= query parameter (e.g. GET wp/v2/pages?_fields=id,title) by ensuring WordPress core will only process the fields requested for the response. Notably, this helps us avoid running the_content when we don’t need to be (#43874 for WordPress 4.9.7).
• Minor enhancements to reflect existing WordPress behaviors:
  • Disables the Preview button when post type isn’t viewable (WordPress/gutenberg#6232 for Gutenberg 2.7)
  • Filters the Post Format list to only formats that are supported (WordPress/gutenberg#6296 for Gutenberg 2.8)
  • Only displays Featured Image UI when theme supports it too (WordPress/gutenberg#6541 for Gutenberg 2.8)

The “Merge Proposal: REST API” GitHub milestone represents the distance we still need to close. Slowly, steadily, we’re bridging the gap, but we could use your help. Here are some of the issues we’re still working through:

• To ensure all necessary data is available to Gutenberg, we’ve settled upon permitting unbounded per_page=-1 REST API requests for authorized users. This landed for GET wp/v2/users (WordPress/gutenberg#6627), is in-progress for GET wp/v2/(pages|blocks) (WordPress/gutenberg#6657), and needs to be addressed for categories, tags, and custom taxonomies. We also need to patch core with this enhancement (#43998 for WordPress 4.9.7?)
• Capabilities can’t be processed directly client-side (WordPress/gutenberg#6361), so we’ve introduced a new targetSchema concept to communicate which actions a user can perform. See it in action with wp:action-sticky (WordPress/gutenberg#6529) and wp:action-assign-author (WordPress/gutenberg#6630). There are a few other actions we will need to work out, and then we’ll need to patch core (no ticket yet).
• Adam is putting together an improved autosaves implementation (WordPress/gutenberg#6257) that I literally cannot wait to see complete. I’m sure he could use some help testing in the near future.
• Felix is implementing a WP_REST_Search_Controller endpoint (WordPress/gutenberg#6489) to power the link search UI.

Join us tomorrow, Thursday, May 10 at 17:00 UTC in #core-restapi office hours if you’d like to chat through any questions you have.

Happy Thursday :)

I’ve started a new crowdsourcing project, the Gutenberg Migration Guide, to document WordPress Classic Editor customization points and their Gutenberg equivalents (if such exist).

For example, the media_buttons action is a common way to add a button atop the editor:

Its Gutenberg-equivalent is the Block Inserter. Converting a media button to the Block Inserter requires registering a block type. And now we have a corresponding page for developers to reference.

media_buttons is only one of the many ways the Classic Editor can be customized. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a database covering all of them?

This is where you come in! Take a look through the Gutenberg Migration Guide. For each action, filter, and so on, we’d like to document real-world examples of how they’ve been used. Then, for each of those real-world examples, identify how the feature might be replicated in Gutenberg.

Have a new hook to suggest or question to ask? Please open a new GitHub issue and we’ll get it sorted.

Since announcing the database on March 1st, 70 people have been granted testing status. However, of 5000 total plugins, we’re still at 4139 untested plugins. No companies have stepped up to contribute a significant amount of person-hours.

Of the 861 tested plugins:

• 219 (25.44%) are compatible.
• 518 (60.16%) are likely compatible.
• 25 (2.9%) are likely not compatible.
• 39 (4.53%) are not compatible.
• 60 (6.97%) are in “testing”, which means someone started test and abandoned the process.

Notably, this data is largely biased by the “likely compatible” results. For the most part, these are plugins I pre-screened (e.g. caching plugins) prior to March.

In the original data set, 18 (28.125%) of the 64 incompatible and likely incompatible plugins were updated in the four weeks prior to March 1st. This means the majority are on slower development cycles.

Of the 64 incompatible and likely incompatible plugins, the reasons include:

• Missing Add Media and TinyMCE buttons (NextGen, WPForms, Formidable, FooGallery, Page Scroll to ID and others).
• Missing QuickTag buttons (Quick AdSense).
• Meta box doesn’t display at all (Page Links To, Revision Control).
• Semi-live preview of SEO title doesn’t work in Gutenberg (All In One SEO).
• Custom Short or Long Product Description fields don’t appear at all (WooCommerce).
• Featured thumbnail previews aren’t being generated (Auto Post Thumbnail).Whitescreen of death (qTranslate X, CKEditor).
• Registers a CPT with editor support that doesn’t include show_in_rest=>true (Portfolio Post Type)
• Adds section to Media Library that isn’t displayed in Gutenberg (Add From Server).
• Access restriction from plugin not applied in Gutenberg (Advanced Access Manager).
• Specifying custom gallery image links isn’t applied in Gutenberg (WP Gallery Custom Links).
• Doesn’t log changes made in Gutenberg (WP Security Audit Log).

Next steps are to be determined. “Try Gutenberg” represents an opportunity to generate more data (out of support forum requests). However, we need a workflow for capturing that data.

It was pretty cool! From the outside, you’ll notice both sliding glass and French doors where garage doors used to be. This is because it’s a basement _and_ garage conversion ADU.

In case you aren’t already aware, ADU is shorthand for adding a second living space (bed, bath, and kitchen) to a residential property. ADUs can be inside the existing structure or somewhere else on the property (space-permitting).

More generally, ADUs are neat because they open up a number of opportunities:

1. In communities without new land to build on, ADUs can be cost-effective infill housing.
2. ADUs make homeownership more attainable by adding cash-flow to cover the mortgage.
3. For seniors wanting to downsize, ADUs can offer a “downsize in place” option that lets them stay within the community.

Here’s a pano of the immediate interior:

The developer, Kol Peterson, has been building and consulting on ADUs for almost a decade now through his company, Accessory Dwelling Strategies. He’s also written a book, Backdoor Revolution, that’s incredibly informative and information-dense. I’m already at page ~150.

As far as building an ADU in our house goes, I’ve already discovered what Kol identifies in the book as a classic regulation blocker:

(5) In addition to the parking spaces required in TDC 73.370 for the detached single-family dwelling, one paved on-site parking space shall be provided for the accessory dwelling unit and the space shall not be within five feet of a side or rear property line.

In short, we need a three car driveway in order to permit an ADU. But, we only have two slots and there’s no place to put a third. And, ironically, our neighbor can park six cars in their garage, driveway, and street just fine.

In case it’s not obvious: this is a bad thing. Let the renewal begin.

In the last six months, we’ve left the refrigerator door open overnight three times. Because the light stays on when the door is open, another horrible design decision, the refrigerator thermometer hits 107°F by the time I notice it in the morning.

At yesterday’s inaugural PDX Raspberry Pi and Arduino meetup, I prototyped my solution to the problem: an alarm for accidentally leaving the refrigerator door open.

Using a Parallax Ping Ultrasonic distance sensor, the Arduino board detects its distance to the nearest object in front of it. If there’s nothing within 2 inches for greater than 5 seconds, then the Arduino board uses a piezo buzzer to make some noise. The system resets when an object is placed within 2 inches again.

On a whole, I was surprised how quickly I got up to speed on Arduino. My “Hello World” project, blinking a LED diode, took about 10 minutes to complete. This distance alarm only took 20 minutes beyond that, with a little bit of guidance on what hardware to use and access to tutorials on how to use it.

Up next: figuring out how to miniaturize the entire setup so I can put it in a small housing and deploy to production (aka use it in my home).

1. Lessons from “The Profit” (Marginal Revolution) — I hardly watch TV but I’m going to binge so hard on this series.

2. The big experiment at Plaza 122 (Bridgeliner) — To buy in, neighborhood residents first have to participate in a financial literacy class, which is available in Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Russian. After completing the course, they can make micro investments of $10 to $100 in the plaza each month. With enough of these investments, the community will eventually own Plaza 122 in full. So cool! You should subscribe to Bridgeliner.

3. One City: Many Futures / Better Block PDX (Design Week Portland) — Can we make this bike lane better, on a budget that’s slightly more than beer? “Street prototyping” as disruptive policy innovation.

4. Open source sabbatical = awesome (Julia Evans) — Sabbaticals as a model for open source sustainability.

• Big WP Meetup NYC - April 12th.

• International Symposium on Online Journalism - April 13th & 14th, Austin.

• MicroConf Starter Edition - May 1st-3rd, Las Vegas.

• WP VIP Workshop - May 14th-17th, Napa.

Do our paths overlap? Let’s hang out!

1. Deliverables.

2. Timeline.

3. People

Successful projects are a harmonious balance of these three attributes. Every failure is the result of some leg of the stool not holding its weight.

But all is not lost! A project can recover at any point by revisiting its first principles, and closing the identified gaps. Simply ask yourself some guided questions.

Have we identified all of the work to be completed?

Project management is the art and science of getting people to work together. And the more people involved in a project, the more challenging it is to get them headed in the right direction.

The project manager takes ownership of ensuring the project is deconstructed to its requisite components, and those tasks are delegated to their relevant parties. Any failure in this process is a failure of the project manager.

Identify the work to be completed, and make sure someone is responsible for it.

Does everyone have the information they need?

Communication is the most important skill for a project manager. It can make or break the entire project. It’s the single most important fulcrum in the whole process.

The tool itself doesn’t matter. Slack, email, Zoom, Google Spreadsheets, Basecamp, Asana, and Jira are all forms of communication.

Communication ensures everyone knows what they need to know.

But this sounds like a bunch of heady mumbo jumbo?

You’re right. It’s up to you to translate these principles to the real world.

New person cc’ed into an email thread? Reply with a recap of the project to bring them up to speed.

Details and nuance getting lost in text? Offer a catch-up call to take advantage of higher-bandwidth communication.

Something not getting done? Make sure the task is actually defined, that there’s a person responsible for it, and that the person is capable of completing the work in the time allotted.

Leading a meeting? Share the agenda for review beforehand, set time limits for each discussion, and identify key takeaways and next steps that serve as the tangible results for the meeting.

General confusion about the project? Synthesize key details into a document everyone has access to, and keep it up to date.

Keep it up!

1. A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place (Kottke.org) — This has always been my raison d’être. See also: why resource utilization isn’t zero-sum.

2. A Performance Question (Rands in Repose) — Canonical manual for dealing with direct report performance.

3. The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen (The Mission) — Structure your deck into a narrative arc.

4. Andrew Sullivan on the Opioid Epidemic in America (NY Mag) — One of the hardest challenges for our generation.

Ideally, the majority of WordPress users should be able to use Gutenberg on the day WordPress 5.0 is released. They’ll hit “Update WordPress”, navigate back to the editor, and continue publishing in Gutenberg with all of the functionality they expect in the Classic Editor.

But plugins! If any one of their active plugins are incompatible with Gutenberg, the WordPress user is likely to experience pain, misery, and bad fortune. Many WordPress installations have a dozen or more active plugins, so WordPress plugins are a significant risk vector for Gutenberg incompatibility.

Enter the Gutenberg Plugin Compatibility Database. The goal for this crowdsourcing tool is to identify whether or not WordPress.org plugins are compatible with Gutenberg. With this data set, we’ll be able to:

• Know the most likely causes of incompatibility.

• Focus developer outreach on the highest impact problems.

• Proactively educate WordPress users on whether or not their WordPress installation is ready for Gutenberg.

The only gotcha: we need lots and lots of person-hours for testing. If each plugin takes roughly 1 minute to test, we’ll need ~75 person-hours to get through the remaining ~4500 plugins in the database.

Check out the project README.md for a more complete introduction to what’s involved. This includes a definition for “Gutenberg-compatible”, explanation for why only 5000 plugins are in the database, and other design decisions.

Do you or someone you know have access to lots of person-hours (e.g. WordCamp contributor day, hosting support team, etc.)? I’d love to chat! Feel free to leave a comment, ping me on WordPress.org Slack (I’m ‘danielbachhuber’), or get in touch however most convenient.

• Natural peanut butter stirring device. You know, to mix the peanut butter back into its oils. This device would need to be high torque with low speed, or it could even be mechanical with some design to increase mixing.

• Fridge door alarm. Amazingly, our fridge doesn’t beep when the door is left open. Many fridges do. This device would emit some noise (or send you a text, etc.) when the sensor detects an opening for >10 seconds.

• USB hub with mounting hardware. All I want is to mount the hub to the back of my desk so I don’t have to see it. Some hubs exist, but the price is quite high for what they are. There’s an opportunity for something with screw holes in the ~$20 range.

• All-in-one individual video conferencing unit. The existing options seem focused on adding a variety of peripherals to your conference room and TV. This setup would be for one person, and include video camera, screen, light source, and audio. A veritable magic box!

Notably:

OverDrive is like free Audible! See if your local library is participating. I’ve been knocking through non-fiction since September.

Goodreads for keeping track of what books I should read and have read. Sometimes the network is useful.

Overcast may seem like an over-hyped podcast app but it’s actually really good. Listening at 1.5x is life-changing.

Look ma, no Mail.app! I made the decision to remove Mail from my phone a few months ago and haven’t looked back.

Spotify is my jam (after switching from Rdio), although I’m growing weary of algorithmic influence on music. Might be time to go back to albums.

Paprika keeps our family’s cookbook in sync between devices. Tonight is turkey meatballs, pasta, and brussel sprouts.

Previously: 2012, 2011. Inspired by Rands.

Consider this search for “tablet arm”:

Which of these should I choose?

• Three of the four have relatively similar ratings.
• All of them are within the same price point.
• None of them are from a name brand I know I can trust.

Such indecision! I could spend 20 minutes scouring through the reviews, but who knows which are real and which are fake these days. Or, I could buy them all and return the ones I don’t want. But packaging stuff back up and taking to UPS is a hassle.

For exactly this reason, I went to Best Buy yesterday (for the first time in decades), looked at video cameras, and bought a nice Canon for a cheaper price than it was listed on Amazon.

I like brands. Brands mean I can form trusting, long-term customer relationships with companies. The Amazon marketplace is overrun with knock-off products from generic drop shippers — bad and getting worse.

Oh, and don’t try to use .local on a Mac because it conflicts with Bonjour local networking. I discovered this with 30 minutes of wasted effort. .test is the way to go.

First, run:

valet domain test

Switch Valet to using the .test domain, which will also update dnsmasq accordingly. Don’t try to edit dnsmasq configuration on your own — there are too many ways to go wrong.

Second, run:

wp package install wp-cli/find-command

Install wp-cli/find-command to find all WordPress installs in your Laravel project directory. It’s convenient for running one WP-CLI command against all WordPress installs.

Third, run:

wp find ~/projects --field=wp_path | xargs -I % wp --path=% search-replace '.dev' '.test' --all-tables

Run wp search-replace against all WordPress installs to replace instances of ‘.dev’ with ‘.test’. ~/projects is my Valet project directory, and --all-tables ensures the procedure is run against all database tables.

Et voila! You’ve switched Laravel Valet from .dev to .test in three easy steps.

Bylines is a modern rewrite of Co-Authors Plus that I started last April. It hasn’t been anywhere near my primary focus for quite a while, so I finally called a spade a spade and started looking for a new owner. Fortunately, it’s a perfect fit for the developers behind PublishPress — I’m glad my customers ended up in good hands.

You can read more about the announcement on the Bylines website.

The other day, I was reading Tualatin City Council’s work session materials for January 22nd (PDF warning). It’s actually pretty interesting. Tualatin is considering a “Local Congestion Relief and Neighborhood Safety” bond measure, and the packet provides much of the background. But it’s a PDF packet and I was only reading it because someone emailed it to me.

Which brings me to the three realizations I had:

1. Open source is Good™ because it increases collaboration. Increased collaboration means increased value creation. Ergo, civic engagement (and pretty much everything) would benefit from open source methodologies.

2. City data is really hard to come by. It needs to be manually collected and it’s often out of date as soon as it’s collected. Nowadays, any effort put into collection should result in a real-time, persistent data stream.

3. Cities should be learning from one another. Meaning, Tualatin must have a data profile similar to dozens of other cities in the US. If city A tries experiment B and it works, then we should use that knowledge as the basis of our evolution, infrastructure investments and otherwise.

Specific to the congestion problem at hand, I also thought it would be pretty cool if someone created an open source traffic modeling system. Lo — OpenTraffic already exists! And here’s some project that calculates traffic speed from cell phone video.

• Buttons in Quote block toolbar randomly shift position
  The “randomness” is that the initial block toolbar is different than the one that appears when focused. We need to track down the source of the discrepancy.

• Additional backtick added when writing code
  It shouldn’t be there!

• Content of Select Media window disappeared after uploading image
  This appears to be some conflict between the Media Library upload drop zone and the Gutenberg upload drop zone.

• Localize weekdays in DateTimePicker
  It looks like this UI is generated by the ReactDatePicker component, so we’ll need to figure out how to pass localization through.

• More tag from classic editor displays warning in Gutenberg
  But it shouldn’t!

• Post accidentally publishes when Gutenberg autosaves and the scheduled date is set to the past
  In the Gutenberg JavaScript client, we should have some logic that verifies the post_date values we’re sending back to the REST API won’t cause the REST API to publish the post.

Read through the contributing guide for details on how to get started. Feel free to ask questions on the specific issue, or join us in the #core-editor channel with any questions you might have.

Update: I forgot I said this: “[The GPL] is used often as a blunt instrument for enforcing certain economic dynamics around everyone’s businesses.” Pretty good!

She did great! She started out skiing between my legs, then we took the lift (her first time), and she finished the day doing some “turns” on her own.

“What is a shedquarters?” you might ask. Well, it’s a “shed” and a “headquarters” — two in one.

Ironically, I’ve had an office for the majority of my remote-work career. First a desk at PIE PDX, then an office sublet at Vadio, then a desk at MobileRQ, and thenan executive office in Tualatin. I’ve found physical separation of work and life to be critically important for mental stability.

But then Leah introduced me to the shedquarters concept and I was instantly hooked. It only took me two and a half years to actually do.

You can build a shedquarters too!

There are a million and one different things I learned the hard way that you can learn the hard way too. And, like every project, it’ll go over budget and take longer than expected:

• June 2017 - Ordered Tuff Shed.
• August 2017 - Tuff Shed installed.
• August 2017 - Scheduled electrician.
• September 2017 - Electrical installed, part 1.
• October 2017 - Did drywall, mud, texture, paint.
• November 2017 - Electrical installed, part 2.
• December 2017 - Trimmed interior (windows and moulding).
• January 2018 - Hung artwork and called the shedquarters done-enough.

Total hours: lots.

Planning your shedquarters

Before you break ground, you’ll need to plan everything out. There are a few different ways to go when building a structure:

• Hire an architect to design something for you ($15k). Once you have the design, hire a general contractor to deal with building it ($15k). I considered this route for a hot second.
• Purchase some prefabricated option (~$10-20k). I looked at Modern Shed and decided against because I read some reviews about mold issues in rainy Pacific Northwest. I also wasn’t sold on the look.
• Purchase a 9’x8’ Tuff Shed, have it installed, and finish the interior yourself ($8,556.84) <-<-<-<- This is what I did!
• Build the entire structure yourself from scratch (~$2-4k). Probably a bad idea unless you’ve done it before. I decided I wanted to start with a structurally sound, waterproof exterior.

When planning your shedquarters, you’ll also need to clear any local building codes. Pro tip: Call your city’s engineering department and explain what you’re up to. They were quite helpful my case. For Tualatin, I needed to make sure the shedquarters was 5’ or more from the property line, and that the total footprint of all structures didn’t exceed 45% of the lot.

Also important to note: my shedquarters is free-standing (i.e. not connected to my house). Connecting something to a house is considered an addition to the house and subject to all sorts of building codes.

Before you complete any of the prep work, you need to pick your building site. I cheated by getting rid of our hot tub, thus freeing up its concrete pad and electrical connection. Unless you cheat too, you’ll need to work out these details.

Building the Tuff Shed

For better or for worse, I bought a prefab structure from Tuff Shed using their web-based Build-A-Quote tool.

I say “for better” because I’m really happy with how it turned out; having the shedquarters fit aesthetically was very important. I say “for worse” because the installation experience was laughably bad; Tuff Shed probably lost a ton of money on me.

Fire up the ol’ web browser and use Tuff Shed’s Build-A-Quote tool to design your shed.

Once I placed my order, it took Tuff Shed ~8 weeks to come and install it. The first installation attempt failed because the sales guy failed to adequately inform me what I needed to do to prepare the building site. The second installation day went fine, except for the defects I discovered after the fact.

Once the Tuff Shed installation was complete, I had a paint-matched building shell that fit aesthetically within the context of our backyard. However, it wasn’t truly complete because there were four remaining issues:

• The door was damaged on arrival. Then, the second door was damaged at the shop. The third door installed just fine.
• A trim piece was missing from the kit…
• … which also meant they couldn’t finish the trim paint.
• The main 3x3 window was installed at a 4 degree angle (i.e. not level nor visually level). “Fixing” this was a serious half-day job.

It somehow took Tuff Shed six additional weeks to fix these issues.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ve heard good things about Tuff Shed and am very pleased with the value and the end result. The entire process was comical though.

Finishing the interior

A shed does not make a shedquarters. You’ll need to finish the interior too. Namely, this means:

• Insulation (easy).
• Drywall (easy), mud (hard), and texture (harder).
• Electrical (hire a pro).
• Flooring (easy).
• Trimming windows (hard) and moulding (easy).

Thanks to the help of patient friends and family, I learned how to do all of this myself. Notably, texturing walls was an absolute beast. Don’t use spray cans like I did; buy a proper sprayer and hopper.

What’s next

Like every project, the shedquarters is never complete.

For instance, I originally installed a ClimateRight 5000 BTU A/C and heater. It works well-enough, but I don’t want to leave it running all the time in the winter. But, if I don’t leave it running, the shedquarters can drop below freezing. After toying with the idea of reverse-engineering ClimateRight’s proprietary thermostat port so I could connect a Nest… I took the lo-tech approach of installing a secondary Cadet heater. Boom — now I have two heaters!

Similarly, our previous two-unit TP-Link wifi network sucked in the shed. I would have to switch to the 2.4G Hz network every time I went out to the shedquarters to avoid packet loss, etc. After anguishing over the hassle of running a wired connection, I decided to try Google WiFi (mesh network). IT WORKS LIKE MAGIC! MAGIC DUST SPRINKLED IN THE AIR! So that problem is solved too.

Upcoming enhancements to the shedquarters include:

• Full-width desk, with a cutout for my existing sit-stand desk.
• Killer speaker system the neighbors will love.
• Video conferencing system from the future.

There’s no end to the amount of money I can dump into it! For now though, I’m pretty happy with my end result and what I learned along the way.

Have a question? Feel free to leave a comment or reach out directly. I didn’t find a ton of DIY info online, so happy to help out the next person.

In total, six failures have been observed:

1. r42421 - REST API: Return the proper status code for failed permission callbacks in WP_REST_Server->dispatch()

   • 3 of 3 hosts reported failures.

   • Travis CI also reported a failure. Root cause was developer error.

2. r42037 - Customize: Support instantiation of partials with flat/unwrapped params for parity with controls, sections, and panels in [41726]
   • 1 of 2 hosts reported failures.
   • Travis CI also reported a failure. Root cause was an unrelated race condition.
3. r41764 - Widgets: Fix jshint error in media widget
   • 1 of 1 hosts reported failures.
   • Travis CI also reported a failure. Root cause was developer error.
4. r41717 - Multisite: Replace calls to refresh_blog_details() with clean_blog_cache()
   • 1 of 1 hosts reported failures.
   • Travis CI reported a success. Root cause of host failure is unknown.
5. r41614 - Users: There is not, in fact, 12345 users on every WordPress installation

   • 1 of 1 hosts reported failures.

   • Travis CI also reported a failure. Root cause was developer error.

6. r41574 - I18N: Merge two similar “Cannot set parent term” error strings

   • 2 of 2 hosts reported failures.

   • Travis CI also reported a failure. Root case was developer error.

Interesting! But also not very interesting because there’s not much to see.

1. Saving the Free Press From Private Equity (Robert Kuttner & Hildy Zenger) — Scathing critique; never did I realize how significant of a role financiers played. Makes me bullish on the opportunity for local media businesses.

2. When is a Dollar not a Dollar? (Leo Polovets) — Excellent set of evaluation criteria for determining where your service/product fits within your customer’s wallet (or whether it does at all).

3. Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer (William Buckner) — Not actually the original affluent society, as we’re led to think.

4. These 6 Cities Are Smarter Than Portland About Housing (Willamette Week) — Useful set of reference points.

5. CSforALL Consortium — Computer literacy/CS education initiative. “8% of STEM graduates are in CS, yet 71% of all new STEM jobs are in computing.”

6. How to tell if a CEO is worth working for (Claire Lew) — Great questions to ask (e.g. “What would an employee who’s left the company say it’s like to work for you?”).

7. Mr. Money Mustache, UBER Driver (Mr. Money Mustache) — No surprise: a highly competitive market means race to the bottom for compensation.

8. How Shopify Grew From a Snowboard Shop to a $10B Commerce Ecosystem (Hiten Shah) — Answer: clear alignment between business model and customer success.

9. The World’s Foremost Expert Explains How To Value Stock (Bloomberg Odd Lots) — Such a clear, understandable explanation.

10. Recession-Resistant Investing & the Benefits of Buying Shopping Centers with David Puchi (BiggerPockets) — Growth trend: buying out individual owners at the end of their careers, and then doing the rehab work they didn’t want to do.

To prepare, I populated a plugins table with data from the WordPress.org REST API via this plugin-stats.php script. Download the SQL file to avoid needing to re-fetch the API data.

Based on the initial API request, there are 49,749 total WordPress.org plugins.

Of the entire data set, only 18,002 plugins have 200 or greater active installs. The remaining 31,747 plugins represent an inconsequential number of active installs compared to the total.

The 18,002 plugins represent 182,296,500 total active installs. A WordPress install can have multiple active plugins, so this total isn’t unique WordPress installs. Also, we can ignore the remaining ~32k plugins because they would only represent 3,174,700 additional active installs if each plugin had 100 active installs.

Of the total active installs, 168,623,000 (92.5%) are represented by 3,440 plugins with >=5000 active installs. For that matter, 159,720,000 (87.6%) are represented by 2101 plugins with >=10000 active installs.

It’d be interesting to know what percentage of WordPress installs have a plugin not tracked in the WordPress.org plugin directory (e.g. premium or custom).

Our first Afternoon Chat/Hack is scheduled for Wednesday, January 17th at the Well & Good Coffee House. If you (or someone you know) can make it to Tigard on a Wednesday afternoon, come join us!

Fortunately, Feedbin is two steps ahead of me! You too can use Feedbin’s “Subscribe to Email Newsletters” feature to move your email newsletter subscriptions into RSS. Simply:

1. Copy your secret newsletter email address from feedbin.com/settings.

2. Add your secret newsletter email address as a forwarding email in Gmail.

3. Configure a Gmail filter for each newsletter to auto-forward to Feedbin (and mark as read / archive).

Pretty awesome.

Humans come first. Software exists to serve humans, not the other way around. Design software for your end user, because they are holy and nothing else is sacred.

Pragmatism over purism. Consider for whom you’re optimizing, not for what ideal. Software ideals are false gods when they don’t serve the humans they’re meant to reflect. Choose the most pragmatic implementation over the most correct one.

Simplicity over complexity. The elegance of complex systems is a dangerous mirage. Complex systems are more difficult to maintain over time, more difficult for new people to understand, and more likely to succumb to entropy. Only choose complexity when it yields significant, durable advantages.

• Innovate Oregon - Spearheaded by TAO with programs in Amity, Dayton, Newberg, Willamina, and Yamhill-Carlton.

• TiE Young Entrepreneurs - School year program with state competition in May.

• Tualatin Mobile Makerspace - Product of the ABC competition that’s now transforming to a Tualatin STEAM non-profit.

• Oregon Robotics Program - Amazingly broken website. Implements FIRST programs in Oregon.

• Oregon MESA - Year-long program run out of PSU focusing on underrepresented middle and high-school students.

Open source is software businesses use to shorten time to market and accelerate their product. Some businesses build and collaborate in public because it’s a leverage strategy to get more from less. Most businesses maximize their use of open source software because they get it for “free”.

Debt is the financial term, stolen for the sake of illustrating a concept.

Open source is debt because:

• Open source software is not a sellable asset. It’s both priceless and devoid of monetary value. What counts is the business value it enables.

• The liability, and effort required to service this liability, grows as: 1) the software gains users, and 2) those users become more dependent the software. Support is a variable accelerant to the liability (e.g. it can grow the liability at an exponential rate).

• Maintainers hold the debt liability. Their ongoing labor is required to service the debt. Typically, maintainers can only escape the obligation by declaring bankruptcy: “it’s done” or “I’m done.”

This idea could be helpful framing for:

• Businesses to understand their dependency on open source in CFO-friendly terms.
• Communities to understand the debt burden carried by maintainers, and general health of the project.

Another, possibly more correct, way of thinking about this is: “every line of source code, open or closed, is a liability.” Businesses own 100% of their closed source liability. They like open source because they would rather own 0% of the liability.

• Remote work has significant cultural stigma. It isn’t yet a mainstream activity in India, so it’s looked upon with negativity. For instance, the maid will come over and ask “why aren’t you at the office? are you sick?”

• Infrastructure isn’t yet eventually distributed. Moderately reliable internet at the office costs 100x what most pay for internet at home. Even the most expensive home internet (5x baseline) can still be inconsistent.

• Working from home has a space constraint. An entire family of five to six people could be living in 400 square feet.

• Labor laws favor full-time employment over contracting. For instance, Indian law requires six months paid leave for mothers. Contractors aren’t afforded similar benefits.

Remote work in India works best among the “intellectual elite”, but this is still a small percentage of the total engineering talent.

Ultimately, the goal is: the vast majority of WordPress users are excited and should be able to use Gutenberg on day one. Fundamentally, this breaks down into two objectives:

1. Make the end-user experience is so good that WordPress users actively want to switch to it. We need to continue user testing as we have been, and iterate based on real user feedback. We also need to market Gutenberg — communicate what users should expect and get them appropriately excited.

2. Mitigate WordPress plugin and theme incompatibilities, to minimize conflicts that would cause WordPress to fall back to the classic editor. Success is defined by the majority of WordPress users being able to use Gutenberg on day one. If too many can’t use Gutenberg because of conflicts, then we’ve failed at launch.

I’ve been brainstorming some strategies for the latter, which really is two parts: identification and mitigation.

First, we need to identify the true extent of the problem: what plugins and themes are incompatible with Gutenberg, and in what ways are each incompatible? Some automated ways we can produce this data includes:

• Manual/automated analysis of action and filters usage, etc.

• Activate each in an isolated environment and take before/after screenshots of the editor screen.

But, I’m thinking good ol’ fashioned crowd-sourcing might be most effective. What if WordPress users had an easy way to report whether a given plugin or theme was compatible with Gutenberg? We could collect this data in aggregate to get a good sense of what types of incompatibilities we should expect, and where we should focus our efforts.

Once we’ve identified the plugin and theme conflicts, we’ll need to mitigate them. Doing so will require excellent documentation, so authors more easily understand the changes they’ll need to make, and deputizing other developers to help with the outreach process.

• When Your Side Project Blows Up with Dawson Whitfield of Logojoy. Logojoy is an online logo creator that uses machine learning to create the perfect logo for you. “Meh, this isn’t AI,” you might say. Doesn’t matter — it has the same disruptive impact. Can you imagine when machine learning can create your website for you?

• a16z Podcast: AI, from ‘Toy’ Problems to Practical Application. The VC-backed tech startup world is focusing on operationalizing technology that already exists.

• Managing Procrastination, Predicting the Future, and Finding Happiness – Tim Urban. Normally, Tim Ferriss bugs the heck out of me. Tim Urban on the other hand (founder of Wait But Why) is like an intellectual Elon Musk. Part of their conversation discussed the long view Urban takes on the topics he writes about — “all the way back to the Big Bang.” Given the long view, and how _much_ society changed in the last 50 years, it’s easy to see how bad humans are at predicting change.

“But Daniel, none of these links are conclusive proof that AI is coming.”

No, the AI apocalypse hasn’t happened yet. But, the pace of change is stunning and we can’t reliably forecast more than six months out (if that).

• Affordable housing. Did you know that affordable housing is defined as paying 30% of income or less on housing? And did you know that Washington County, where Tualatin is located, has a gap of ~14,500 houses and growing? I didn’t either until about five months ago. Even if you can still afford your housing, this is a problem the entire socio-economic spectrum should be working on.

• Government technology. The USDS is really cool and having an amazing impact. You should listen to Jennifer Pahlka’s SALT talk, “Fixing Government: Bottom Up and Outside In”. I wish there was a similar initiative in Oregon. Is there one?

• Landing Gutenberg in WordPress 5.0. Gutenberg is a revolutionary editing interface. So revolutionary, in fact, that it’s one of the worst-rated plugins in the WordPress.org directory. Getting from where we are now to happily shipped in core is going to be a challenging, multi-faceted initiative.

Let me know if you have any input on these problems, or whether there are others I should be considering!

Leif Erikson from Thurman Gate to Alder trail to Wildwood and back down. Perfect way to spend a Sunday morning.

Having a great test suite ensures exceptional build quality because:

• It’s easy to write new tests, which means they actually get written.
• The tests interface with a command in the same manner as users interface with a command, and they describe how the command is expected to work in human-readable terms.

WordPress should have amazing integration tests too.

Historically, PhantomJS has been the de-facto standard for headless browser testing. PhantomJS is also Yet Another Abandoned Open Source project, and generally a pain to deal with. But we’re in luck! Headless Chrome shipped in Chrome 59. It’s pretty amazing. For your next side project, try out the Puppeteer library.

Now that we’re over the headless browser hurdle, implementing automated browser testing is simply a matter of:

1. Picking a framework. Behat is one option (see WordHat for an example), and Codeception is another. I like Behat, but Codeception is based on PHPUnit which might be a perk.
2. Setting up a Docker container to provide a WordPress install in an isolated environment. For ease of use, Chrome headless could be provided in another container.
3. Writing some tests. Prior to writing tests though, it would be helpful to plan out all major UX flows we want to cover with tests.

In fact, I’d argue that integration tests will be key for managing breakage when Gutenberg lands in WordPress core.

What would be really neat is if the test suite supported importing some base “state”, such that it’d be possible to easily run the same test against dozens of scenarios. This would let us perform an experiment where run the test suite against every plugin in the WordPress.org plugin directory.

1. The Personal MBA (Josh Kaufman) – As the title implies, everything you’d get from a MBA in one book. Except the school name and associated tuition bill, of course.
2. The Quarterlife User Manual (Rob Montz) – Succinct set of guideposts for those who haven’t figured out their careers yet.
3. Building Habit-Forming Products with Nir Eyal, the Author of “Hooked” (The Indie Hackers Podcast) – Seems sketchy, but actually really useful framing for product development.
4. How Business Contributes To Income Inequality (Money For The Rest of Us) – Big companies used to put their customers, employees, and communities first. Now they put their shareholders first. Lo, problems arise.
5. Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win (Jocko Willink and Leif Babin) – I thought this book would be too bro-y and ended up loving it. If you like action movies at all, you get a two for one: business lessons told in an entertaining way.
6. On Writing Product Roadmaps (Gaurav Oberoi) – Well-communicated overview to quarterly vs. long-term planning.
7. Barba.js (Luigi De Rosa) – Single-page app experience without a complex SPA framework.
8. Being a Startup Founder is a minimum wage job — Here’s the proof (Brandon Evans) – Brutal economics of VC-backed companies.
9. The Power of Anti-Goals (Andrew Wilkinson) – Instead of focusing on aspirations, prioritize based on avoiding negatives (tired, too busy, etc.).
10. The Minimally-nice Open Source Software Maintainer (Brian Anderson) – Identified tactics: respond quickly, give thanks, pay a compliment, say “yes”, be clear about what you expect, admit your mistakes, be effusive.

Person A [6:37 AM] Please ping me when you are online.

Person B [7:42 AM] What’s up?

Person A [8:56 AM] What do you think about topic X?

In case it’s not immediately obvious, this conversation is horribly ineffective. It’s imprecise, has a high degree of latency, and is hugely wasteful.

Email gained a bad reputation because people started abusing it. Slack is the new email because it’s become an “all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.”

I deleted the Slack desktop app a while back. Being signed in to a dozen plus Slack organizations led to notification paralysis — the unread indicator made it impossible to get anything done. Since then, I open the corresponding Slack organization when I’m actively working on a given project, and leave it closed otherwise.

But, this approach still has the problem of mentions / direct messages, email notifications, and high latency. Going forward, I’m instituting a new policy of encouraging email (or some other async medium) when I’m not actively signed in to Slack. If you see me online, feel free to ping me. Otherwise, please use a more appropriate medium.

Thank you for introducing me to dehydrated foods, yet another under appreciated quality of life.

Thank you for your strong sense of sensibility. Even though it can be difficult to resist desire, delayed gratification is always more rewarding.

Thank you for encouraging higher education. Even though I didn’t manage to graduate college, your expectations set a high bar to reach.

Thank you for my father. I obviously wouldn’t be here today without him. But even more so, I am a strong reflection of him, and he a strong reflection of you. Everything I appreciate and value is a manifestation of your strength of character.

Thank you for my aunts, uncles, and cousins. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized how lucky I am to be surrounded by a loving, fun, thoughtful and caring extended family.

Grandpa, you’re neither gone nor forgotten.

You’re still here with every one of us — in fact, we’re inseparable. I know that I can always spend time with you by going mushrooming in the woods, cooking good food for my entire family, and holding myself to higher standards.

I’m only 30 and still my time on earth is limited. I’ll consider myself successful if I manage to have half the impact you’ve had.

Love you, Grandpa.

Ran with my momma and sang happy birthday to her over the PA at the start.

Here’s how it might work:

1. When you sign up for an account, you connect your Google Analytics account, so the service has intelligence about your current traffic patterns.
2. Based on expected resource utilization, the service suggests a server configuration on AWS, Digital Ocean, or Google Cloud Platform. Once you select your preference, the service provisions a WordPress-optimized hosting stack on the provider.
3. As a part of the offering, the service provides a best-in-class object-cache drop-in, CDN-based full-page cache, Elasticsearch integration, etc.
4. Over time, as the service passively monitors the performance of your WordPress instance, it offers suggestions for additional application-level optimizations (think New Relic but with a higher-level understanding of WordPress).
5. Over time, the service also passively monitors your resource spend. If it detects there’s a more price-performant option on the market, the service makes it possible to migrate your site to new infrastructure seamlessly. As an example, a client of mine was spending $1k+ per month on Amazon’s CloudFront CDN. Now they’re spending $20/month on CloudFlare.

The target market is every customer subject to “Contact us for a quote” pricing (typically $2k/month and up). The service would enable a non-technical company to run their website in the price-performant public cloud without needing to internalize the DevOps cost.

Some existing options include ServerPilot and Laravel Forge, but neither focus deeply on WordPress.

Crazy?

Use wp db size --tables to see the size of all tables:

$ wp db size --tables
+-----------------------+--------+
| Name                  | Size   |
+-----------------------+--------+
| wp_users              | 9 KB   |
| wp_usermeta           | 66 KB  |
| wp_posts              | 274 MB |
| wp_comments           | 48 MB  |
| wp_links              | 3 KB   |
| wp_options            | 41 MB  |
| wp_postmeta           | 25 MB  |
| wp_terms              | 796 KB |
| wp_term_taxonomy      | 621 KB |
| wp_term_relationships | 905 KB |
| wp_termmeta           | 48 KB  |
| wp_commentmeta        | 687 MB |
+-----------------------+--------+

Whoa! wp_commentmeta is way larger than I’d expect it to be. What’s going on there?

Let’s take a look at what keys are used:

$ wp db query "SELECT DISTINCT meta_key FROM wp_commentmeta"
+-----------------------+
| meta_key              |
+-----------------------+
| akismet_result        |
| akismet_history       |
| ERRating              |
| akismet_user_result   |
| akismet_user          |
| akismet_rechecking    |
| akismet_as_submitted  |
| akismet_pro_tip       |
| _wp_trash_meta_status |
| is_customer_note      |
| rating                |
+-----------------------+

Hm. Can’t quite tell what might be a large one from that set. Let’s look at a random comment:

$ wp comment meta list 659968
+------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| comment_id | meta_key             | meta_value                                                                              |
+------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 659968     | akismet_result       | true                                                                                    |
| 659968     | akismet_history      | {"time":1503414726.1497,"event":"check-spam"}                                           |
| 659968     | akismet_as_submitted | {"comment_author":"coach handbag tassels embroidery","comment_author_email":"uazetk@gma |
|            |                      | il.com","comment_author_url":"http:\/\/www.bestcoachbag.store\/accordion-zip-wallet-in- |
|            |                      | signature-embossed-leather-p-37.html","comment_content":"Hi, i think that i saw you vis |
|            |                      | ited my site thus i came to return the favor?I'm attempting to find things to enhance m |
|            |                      | y website!I suppose its ok to use some of your ideas!!","comment_type":"","user_ip":"58 |
|            |                      | .19.83.5","user_agent":"Mozilla\/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Mozill |
|            |                      | a\/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)","blog":"http:\ |
|            |                      | /\/example.com","blog_lang":"en_US","blog_charset":"UTF-8","permalink":"http:\/\/exa |
|            |                      | ple.com\/one-two-three"}                                           |
+------------+----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

What on Lord’s earth? Why is Akismet storing a copy of every comment in comment meta? I wonder how large that is in total:

$ wp db query "SELECT sum(char_length(meta_value)) FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE meta_key='akismet_as_submitted'"
+------------------------------+
| sum(char_length(meta_value)) |
+------------------------------+
|                    567045828 |
+------------------------------+

Ah, I see. Akismet’s akismet_as_submitted entry is 567 MB of the 1 GB total database size. That makes sense.

PS I tried to list the total comments but then I ran into a WP-CLI bug. Que será, será.

A limited set (199 in total) will be headed to WordCamp Europe next week for WP-CLI’s biggest fans.

wp-cli update --nightly

Live life on the bleeding edge by running latest and greatest version of WP-CLI.

The master branch is typically stable enough to use in local and staging environments. Or production too, yolo.

wp scaffold theme-tests

You probably knew you could scaffold plugin tests, but you probably didn’t know that you could also scaffold theme tests.

wp scaffold theme-tests gives you everything you need to write PHPUnit tests that leverage the WordPress test suite. Specifically:

• bin/install-wp-tests.sh is a setup script to download the WordPress test suite and create the test database.
• .travis.yml is a configuration file to automatically run your tests every time you push to GitHub (Travis account required).
• tests/ contains the PHPUnit-specific files. You can modify test-sample.php to your liking.

Functionally, theme tests are pretty much the same as plugin tests. Check out the generated tests/bootstrap.php file for the secret of how your theme gets loaded into the test suite.

wp role reset

If you’ve been monkeying about with core’s default roles, wp role reset will set them back to the basics.

Reset a single role, or reset them all with --all.

wp rewrite list --match=<uri>

Rewrite rules are WordPress’ API for routing URI patterns to WP_Query instances.

For historical reasons, rewrite rules are stored in an option, which means you need to “flush” (regenerate) rewrite rules any time you register a new one.

The --match=<uri> argument makes it possible to see which rewrite rules match the URI you’ve provided, making it simple to debug why your rewrite rule doesn’t seem to be working. Because rewrite rules never work the first time.

wp shell

Ever wish you could literally write and run PHP code against WordPress?

Well, now you can. Actually, you’ve been able to for years.

wp site empty

If you want to delete all content in your WordPress install, but keep users, options, etc., wp site empty is your new best friend.

wp cron event run

After the Rewrite API, WP Cron is the WordPress developer’s second most bane of their existence. It’s opaque, buggy, and unreliable.

But, we have to use it, so we may as well make it easier to work with.

--prompt

There are some commands I still can never remember the arguments for.

--prompt works with any WP-CLI command, even those you write yourself, and interactively walks you through all of the arguments you need to complete.

wp-cli.yml

WP-CLI supports global- and project-based configuration files to accelerate your workflow.

For instance, if you use the same command with the same arguments over and over again, you can define those arguments as the default arguments for the command.

“Ugh, I always have to enter the same username and password when installing WordPress”… no you don’t!

Bonus!

You must be a WP-CLI master.

Here are four challenges for you to complete (with WP-CLI) in two minutes or less. For the solution, click on the link to see the GIF:

• Generate a CSV of all administrators.
• Delete all posts, but leave pages.
• First, activate Akismet with wp plugin activate. Then, deactivate Akismet by editing the serialized active_plugins option.
• Run wp rewrite flush against all sites in WordPress multisite.
• Create a new WP-CLI command.

• Waiting until 6 am to begin working. For a while now (year or more), I’ve been waking up anywhere between 3:30 and 4:30, and diving right into work. Needless to say, this is a recipe for sleep deprivation during the week. By forcing myself to wait until 6 am to work, I’m (hopefully) forcing myself to sleep another 45 to 60 minutes.
• Only using Slack through the web browser. Rather than follow every community all the time, I’m only going to open each Slack organization as it’s relevant to what I’m working on. As far as distractions go, Slack is the new Twitter.
• Using Focus to limit access to distracting websites and apps. I probably should’ve done this a while back. I’d much rather have 7.5 really productive hours in the day, than 10 moderately productive ones.

MVP is a reincarnation of Co-Authors Plus. From there, I plan to iterate on a feature set relevant to the multi-author publishing workflow.

If this sounds useful to you, sign up to be notified when Bylines is ready for early-access users.

How do you organize daily/weekly schedules so that community PRs are not forgotten? 

Call me a glutton for punishment, but I receive email notifications for all the GitHub activity of projects I manage. I use email because:

• Email is easy to quickly process with keyboard shortcuts.
• Email keeps track of read/unread state for me.
• As needed, I can create filters to help manage my information flow.

Ultimately, this means I see a pull request as soon as it comes in (or, at least, when I check my email).

When I see the pull request come in, I take some form of action on it. This action is either:

• Make a judgement as to whether the pull request will be able to land — yes without additional changes, yes with additional changes, or no.
• Determine I’ll need to set aside dedicated time to review (and make a judgement).

In both cases, I respond to the contributor accordingly. In the latter case, I add the code review to my task management tool, and come back to it when I have the bandwidth.

All of this hopefully underscores I think it’s important to communicate well, and handle contributions in a timely, effective manner.

How do you manage with contributions which need rebasing, amending and/or tweaking – and the contributor is silent for months?

WP-CLI has a two-week abandonment policy. If we don’t hear from you in two weeks, then we consider the pull request is abandoned.

Usually around day 10, I’ll reach out on the thread and as the contributor if they’ll be coming back to finish up. They respond most of the time, with either “yes, just need another day or two” or “no, I’m too busy now.”

When a pull request is abandoned and I want to land the code anyway, I’ll fork their branch so they still get credit for the work they’ve done and finish it up.

Does every team member manages her/his own time, or do you clock community-related work?

My dba, Hand Built, actually just a business of me, myself, and I. In 2015 (the last year I calculated it), I spent 12.26% of my time contributing to open source.

This year, things are bit different. Not only do I get paid (on a part-time basis) to maintain WP-CLI, but I have the budget to eventually hire a couple more part-time maintainers. The first is ramping up right now.

The expectation is that each of us commits an average of five to ten hours per week towards project. The theory is this is enough time to make regular, substantial contributions to the project, while also having enough of a foot in the real world to focus our effort on what’s most important. Each person is expected to manage her/his own time, balancing WP-CLI with the rest of their life as they see fit.

What was the impact of 5 For the Future for you when it was launched, and do you feel the 5FF campaign is still relevant/followed today?

For those who aren’t in the loop, “5 For The Future” was/is a call by Matt Mullenweg for companies to dedicate 5% of their people towards the WordPress project:

I think a good rule of thumb that will scale with the community as it continues to grow is that organizations that want to grow the WordPress pie (and not just their piece of it) should dedicate 5% of their people to working on something to do with core — be it development, documentation, security, support forums, theme reviews, training, testing, translation or whatever it might be that helps move WordPress mission forward.

Personally, I’m not sure how much of an impact 5FF specifically had on increasing the labor pool for the WordPress project. It seemed to be more of a one-time rallying cry than anything else.

I don’t mean to discount the intent, though. While the WordPress project could certainly benefit from more labor capacity, it certainly has a lot already from a healthy variety of companies. Furthermore, introducing more labor to the project also requires scaling up capacity to direct the labor.

On the other side, five percent of people seems to be a very challenging goal for many companies. If I were to put a number to it, it seems like most companies engaged with open source would be in the one to two percent range.

Which isn’t to say it’s not important for companies to more effectively support the open source projects they depend on. Contributing to open source is still hard: it’s a lot of overhead to stay regularly engaged with a project, and difficult to account for the benefit of the contributions.

• Walking to the beach from our amazing Airbnb home.
• Everything happening at Balboa park.
• Four varieties of grilled pizza (no pictures except the raw ingredients, unfortunately).

First, add the record for the domain to your /etc/hosts file:

sudo echo '127.0.0.1 my-project.com' >> /etc/hosts

Then, in your parked directory, create a symlink with the domain you want to serve:

$ cd ~/projects/
$ valet park
This directory has been added to Valet's paths.
$ mkdir my-project
# my-project.dev is now served by Valet
$ ln -s my-project my-project.com
# my-project.com is now served by Valet

Valet’s Nginx configuration handles all requests by default, so don’t bother creating a custom Nginx config file. Having it serve your specific domain is only a matter of making sure Valet knows where to find your project directory, given its auto-discovery behavior.

Inspired by Pantheon’s WP Launch Check (credit where credit is due), wp doctor saves your team hours of time by codifying diagnosis procedures into a series of checks run by WP-CLI. For example, cron-count is a check to ensure WP Cron hasn’t exploded with jobs:

Not only does it come with dozens of default checks, wp doctor is designed for extensibility. Easily create a custom doctor.yml file to define additional checks you deem necessary for your system:

If you manage more than a few WordPress installations, wp doctor is your new favorite WP-CLI command.

I voted Hillary Clinton predominately because I think Donald Trump is a whack job, unfit for President, and that Hillary better represents my social values. Going into Election Day, even though media coverage leaned strongly towards Hillary, my thinking was that I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump won. And then he did, and I was surprised, but not really.

Some people close to me are in the minority groups subject to Trump’s hate speech (LGBTQ, non-white). Other people close to me probably voted Trump, although I haven’t yet talked to them about it directly.

I’m a registered Independent, and would consider myself socially progressive, fiscally conservative, and politically libertarian. In less contentious political arenas, I voted Kate Brown for Governor of Oregon, no to Measure 97 (increased corporate income tax), and yes to Tualatin City Council term limits.

I don’t think Trump won because he’s a racist, misogynist, and bigot. I think he won for the same reasons the congressional approval rating is at 13%, voter turnout was 55% (a 20 year low), and I myself have been largely politically apathetic for the majority of my voting career. Most Americans have lost faith in the US government — they don’t think their elected politicians are effective representatives of their interests.

I don’t think most Trump voters are ignorant, hateful, etc. Given the divisive state of affairs in this country, the only path forward is respect, mutual understanding, and compassion. I’ve been sharing op-eds from Trump supporters because I think it’s important to listen to their stories. I’ve also found these articles illuminating:

• The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb
• It’s Going to Be Okay
• The Reason for the Electoral College (but also The real reason we have an Electoral College: to protect slave states)
• What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class

This morning, my wife and I attended service at West Hills Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, my first time at church in years. Reverend Tracy gave an amazing sermon titled “Compassion and Action”. The audio will eventually be posted to that link, I think.

This release focuses predominantly on splitting WordPress’ alloptions cache into separate cache keys to mitigate cache pollution caused by race conditions. [Read #31245](https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/31245) for all of the gory details. Thanks to [Ryan](https://twitter.com/rmccue) and [Joe](https://twitter.com/joe_hoyle) for paving the way.

If you haven’t thought about WP LCache since the [v0.1.0 announcement](https://handbuilt.co/2016/09/08/introducing-wp-lcache-v0-1-0/), you’re missing out. WP LCache is faster than other object cache implementations because:

* By using APCu, which is in-memory, WP LCache uses the fastest possible persistent object cache backend and avoids costly network connections on every request. When using a Memcached or Redis-based persistent object cache where Memcached or Redis is on a different machine, the millisecond cost of each cache hit can add up to seconds of network transactions on every request. * By incorporating a common L2 cache, WP LCache synchronizes cache data between multiple web nodes. Cache updates or deletes on one node are then applied to all other nodes. Without this synchronization behavior, APCu can’t be used in server configurations with multiple web nodes because the cache pool is local to the machine.

Still not convinced? WP LCache has a variety of features no one else has, including native handling of cache groups, meaning you can delete an entire group of keys with `wp_cache_delete_group( $group );`.

Props again to [David Strauss](https://twitter.com/davidstrauss) for his ongoing work on the LCache library, and to [Pantheon](https://pantheon.io/) for sponsoring open source infrastructure.

Install, activate and enable with `wp plugin install –activate wp-lcache && wp lcache enable`.

“But why another object cache drop-in?” you might ask. Because it’s faster than the others, of course.

Under the hood, WP LCache uses LCache, a library that applies the tiered caching model of multi-core processors (with local L1 and central L2 caches) to web applications. In this particular configuration, APCu is the L1 cache and the database is the L2 cache.

APCu is the fastest persistent cache backend you can use, because it exists in PHP memory. However, APCu traditionally can’t be used on multiple web nodes because each node represents a different cache pool. Because WP LCache has a database-based L2 cache, a cache update or delete on one node is then automatically synchronized to all other nodes.

Props to David Strauss for his hard work on the LCache library. Thanks to Steve Persch and Josh Koenig for their help with the WordPress implementation.

Feeling adventurous? Install WP LCache from WordPress.org or Github, and send us feature requests (or bug reports).

Having never planned a high school reunion before, here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I wish I had known in advance:

• Pick a date about 9 months in advance, announce it, and then don’t think about it for 7 months. You don’t need to spend 7 months meeting, discussing, and meeting again. The last two months are sufficient for pulling all of the details together.
• Convince 5-10 people to volunteer. Even if you think you can do all of the work, getting buy-in from others means there are other people with a vested interest in making the reunion a success.
• Choose a venue that’s a good fit for a high school reunion. We ended up at On Deck Sports Bar and Grill, which regularly hosts reunions. This was awesome, because it meant they already had some of the logistics covered.
• Rent a couple sets of cornhole. Ladder Golf and giant Jenga are fun too, but cornhole seems to be the winner for parties.
• Put conversation starters on the name tags. Make them fun, and not offensive, to make them a good entry point into re-meeting someone you haven’t talked to in 10 years.
• As a host, put extra effort into circulating, striking conversations with people, and making people feel welcome. Everyone initially feels super awkward about being a high school reunion. If you can help them break the ice, they’ll get into enjoying the party much quicker.
• Purchase a pony keg to keep the alcohol flowing for those who want to keep drinking after their drink tickets run out. I think offering the pony key was the right balance between not having enough drink tickets, and everyone getting smashed.
• Put a little bit of effort into decorating to make the venue feel special. We had a banner, “Welcome Tualatin High School Class of 2006”, and some light decorations at every table.

We had a ton of fun last Saturday night. I’m super glad I volunteered to help out (I wasn’t on ASB or anything). And, now I know what’s involved for next time!

If we can solve this organizational design challenge, then landing the WP REST API endpoints, and other large improvements to the project, becomes an “easy” task (or at least one requiring a known amount of people with a known amount of involvement). If we can’t solve this organizational design challenge, then it does us no good to commit the endpoints to WordPress core. My biggest fear is for the endpoints to become another media library.

Specific to the WP REST API endpoints, I think it’s time for WordPress to aggressively pursue the component maintainer model. We need effective, reliable component maintainership to take responsibility for producing quality endpoints for each component.

SRCCON is pretty much my favorite conference of all time. The first year was in Philly, and the second year was in Minneapolis. This year, SRCCON ended up in Portland, on my birthday to boot, which meant I could do the unthinkable: attend SRCCON by bike.

As it turns out, there’s a great bike path for all but a quarter mile or so of the ride.

Tualatin to Portland

From Tualatin Community Park, ride through Cook Park and then along Hall Blvd. You’ll go past the Tigard Public Library, over 217, and then eventually end up on Oleson Rd. There’s a short jaunt on Garden Home, then you end up on Multnomah Blvd for quite a while. The one sketchy part of the route there is where Multnomah turns into Terwilliger, and you have to bike on the odd combo off/on-ramp. From Terwilliger, you turn right onto Barbur for a short while, then drop down to the waterfront near Willamette Sailing Club. It took me about an hour to get to this point. The waterfront then connects you to whatever part of downtown you want to go to.

Portland to Tualatin

Surprisingly, Google Maps doesn’t just reverse the route for the ride home. Coming from the Pearl, I ended up taking Broadway to Terwilliger, where I rode in the shade for quite a while. After Terwilliger, you take Capitol Hwy to Multnomah Blvd again, then reverse tracks home.

Awesome way to spend the day!

Miracle Method to the rescue! Literally. Our tech, Owen, did an amazing job, and was very professional. He spent an hour more than he planned color matching to our old bathtub. I wish we had found this option sooner, and avoided a good six months of procrastinating.

Our Bob stroller has been a great investment. But, with the birth of Charlie in December, I needed a way to take both kids running with me. After a few week deliberating on whether we should buy a double Bob and a bike trailer, or if we should spend $800+ on a dual purpose trailer stroller, I’m happy to report the much less expensive Burley Honey Bee Trailer is pretty much the best thing ever.

As a running stroller, the Honey Bee is light and easy to push. There’s ample storage space for blankets and kids snacks, and the rain cover means we can go for a family run regardless of the weather. The only downside is that the front tire can get a bit wobbly at times.

As a bike trailer, the Honey Bee is easy to pull and steer with. Because it has the front wheel attached to the bike arm, we can easily detach the trailer at our destination, and use it as a stroller. Magic! The trailer also easily disassembles to fit in the trunk of our Subaru Crosstrek.

Last November, I published a Kickstarter, and was completely blown away by the support. This month, the funding ran out, so I thought I’d post one last RESTful WP-CLI update.

Actually, the story doesn’t end here. I’m writing a massive retrospective post about using Kickstarter to fund open source, so keep an eye out for that. Also, WP-CLI v0.24.0 is due out a week from now, July 27th, and it’s looking to be the largest release ever. When you do a Kickstarter, it’s really just the beginning of something bigger.

Enough with the superlatives, let’s dive into some new features. Remember: RESTful WP-CLI features require under the hood changes to WP-CLI. You’ll want to wp cli update --nightly to play with this new functionality locally. Once you’ve done so, you can wp package install wp-cli/restful to install the latest.

Effortlessly use WP-CLI against any WordPress install

WP-CLI aliases are shortcuts you register in your wp-cli.yml or config.yml to effortlessly run commands against any WordPress install.

For instance, if I’m working locally on the runcommand theme, have registered a new rewrite rule, and need to flush rewrites inside my Vagrant-based virtual machine, I can run:

$ wp @dev rewrite flush
Success: Rewrite rules flushed.

Then, once the code goes to production, I can run:

$ wp @prod rewrite flush
Success: Rewrite rules flushed.

Look ma! No more SSH’ing into machines, changing directories, and generally spending a full minute to get to a given WordPress install.

Additionally, alias groups let you register groups of aliases. If I want to run a command against both runcommand WordPress instances, I can use @both:

$ wp @both core check-update
Success: WordPress is at the latest version.
Success: WordPress is at the latest version.

Aliases can be registered in your project’s wp-cli.yml file, or your user’s global ~/.wp-cli/config.yml file:

@prod:
  ssh: runcommand@runcommand.io~/webapps/production
@dev:
  ssh: vagrant@192.168.50.10/srv/www/runcommand.dev
@both:
  - @prod
  - @dev

But wait, what’s the ‘ssh’ in there?

WP-CLI now natively supports a --ssh=<host> global parameter for running a command against a remote WordPress install. Many thanks to XWP and their community for paving the way with WP-CLI SSH.

Under the hood, WP-CLI proxies commands to the ssh executable, which then passes them to WP-CLI installed on the remote machine. Your syntax for -ssh=<host> can be any of the following:

• Just the host (e.g. wp --ssh=runcommand.io), which means the user will be inferred from your current system user, and the path will be the SSH user’s home directory.
• The user and the host (e.g. wp --ssh=runcommand@runcommand.io).
• The user, the host, and the path to the WordPress install (e.g. wp --ssh=runcommand@runcommand.io~/webapps/production). The path comes immediately after the TLD of the host.

Or, if you use a ~/.ssh/config, <host> can be any host alias stored in the SSH config (e.g. wp --ssh=rc for me).

Note you do need a copy of WP-CLI on the remote server, accessible as wp. Futhermore, --ssh=<host> won’t load your .bash_profile if you have a shell alias defined, or are extending the $PATH environment variable. If this affects you, here’s a more thorough explanation of how you can make wp accessible.

RESTful WP-CLI v0.2.0 and beyond

Today marks the release of RESTful WP-CLI v0.2.0. Among 43 closed issues and pull requests, I’d like to highlight two new features.

First, use wp rest (post|user|comment|*) generate to create an arbitrary number of any resource:

$ wp @wpdev rest post generate --count=50 --title="Test Post"
Generating items  100% [==============================================] 0:01 / 0:02

When working on a site locally, you often need dummy content to work with. There are a myriad of ways custom post types can store data in the database though, so generating dummy content can be a painstaking process. Because the WP REST API represents a layer of abstraction between the client (e.g. WP-CLI in this case) and the database, it’s much easier to produce a general purpose content generation command.

In the future, I’d love to see dummy data generated for each field based on the resource schema.

Second, use wp rest (post|user|comment|*) diff to compare resources between two enviroments:

# "command" isn't a typo in this example; "command" is a content type expressed through the WP REST API on runcommand.io
$ wp @dev rest command diff @prod find-unused-themes --fields=title
(-) http://runcommand.dev/api/ (+) https://runcommand.io/api/
  command:
  + title: find-unused-themes

When working with multiple WordPress environments, you may want to know how these environments differ. Because the WP REST API represents a higher-level abstraction on top of WordPress, computing the difference between two environments becomes a matter of fetching the data and producing a comparison.

There are a number of ways the diff command could be improved, so consider this implementation to be the prototype.

What’s next?

More immediately, I’d like to start looking at how well RESTful WP-CLI works with plugins and themes. If you’ve written custom endpoints for the WP REST API, please weigh in on this Github issue so I can check it out.

Ultimately, the goal is for wp rest post to replace wp post, but there are many months between here and there. In this future where WP-CLI packages are first-class citizens amongst the commands in WP-CLI core, RESTful WP-CLI gets to serve as a testbed for figuring out how that actually works. We shall see, we shall see.

As always, thanks for your support!

https://gist.github.com/danielbachhuber/206f2cea8dab1ce73d5a71a04810ac57

Ugh.

Seems like people only want to use open source for free. When it comes to paying for support or fixing bugs, no one sees the value.

So many good projects on Github living semi-abandoned, decrepit lives because there’s no economic model for maintaining them.

Feeling quite discouraged right now :(

For the last several months, I’ve been slowly, steadily working to solve this problem with runcommand (albeit in a limited domain, WP-CLI commands). Eventually, I’d like for runcommand to become a healthy, for-profit company, with an entire team to work on these two problems:

• Provide ongoing maintenance and general improvements to existing infrastructure many businesses depend upon.
• Collaboratively create new features, to reduce the development and maintenance burden for those who use it.

“Sparks” is my first iteration on the collaborative roadmap concept.

For instance, every single managed WordPress hosting company would benefit from a diagnostic tool for WordPress sites, yet none of them have invested in an open source solution because the cost of maintenance is too high (one actually started a project but hasn’t improved it much over time). Similarly, every single WordPress agency would benefit from a Drupal migration command, yet none of them have open-sourced their internal abstraction because the cost-benefit ratio makes zero sense.

The key idea behind Sparks is to create a space where WordPress-based businesses can contribute to an open source roadmap, collaboratively prioritize, and then share the cost of development and maintenance. I see this as a huge opportunity for businesses predicated on access to reliable open source software.

As I mentioned in my WCEU presentation, Nadia Eghbal is doing wonderful research into the economics of open source. She’s even put together a Github-based guide to financial support for open source projects. I’d like to highlight a passage from her kickoff post:

Most developer tools have nothing to charge for, and are not big or centrally organized enough to get venture or corporate funding. Projects that we use, or indirectly benefit from, every day. (Every app on your phone right now is using one of these projects in its software. I guarantee it.)

In other words, everybody is building software, but ignoring the tools we need to build them.

To support that, a couple of thoughts:

1. There is an enormous disconnect between project owners and their stakeholders. Every open source developer I spoke to thought there was a “funding problem”, even if there was disagreement about how to fix it. But hardly any founder, VC, or big tech employee was aware of the issue, even when they used or benefitted directly from these projects.
2. This is a relatively new problem. Open source has been around for 30 years. It worked well in the early days, but from 2008–2013, GitHub and Stack Overflow made it go hockey stick. Today, more people use open source, but fewer people contribute back, than ever before. And everybody assumes that somebody else is doing it. (This is also known as the “free rider problem”. Left unchecked, it leads to a tragedy of the commons.)

What could go wrong? Well, this, or this, or this. People getting burned out and quitting. Bugs or security vulnerabilities that go undetected. But also, people just making less stuff. Society moving a little more slowly.

The better we make open source, the better we make technology as a whole. When we have really good tools, it’s easier for everybody to use them to do creative and interesting things.

The pricing aspect of runcommand’s hybrid support and custom development model has been a tougher sell than I expected. I don’t yet have a one-line answer to “what development effort do I get for my money?”. I’ve thought long and hard about the idea that each pricing tier gets you a certain amount of votes on Sparks. But, a voting mechanism implies a certain number of votes are required for each Spark, which implies level of effort estimations and harder to manage expectations. Plus, the price doesn’t just go towards development of new features, it goes towards everything else too.

Ultimately, I know this is a positioning issue — not one of the idea itself. When I explain the concept of Sparks to a prospective customer, they get it. It makes a ton of sense to share the burden of building and maintaining boring, business-critical infrastructure. High-touch support and custom development is expensive though, which makes it challenging to offer more affordable pricing options. But I also know that phrased differently (props to Tim Dobson), businesses would willingly pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for solutions to some of the problems on the roadmap. And the cost of building and maintaining any of these solutions in-house is easily tens of thousands of dollars.

Just so it’s stated, philosophically I believe commercial enterprise can be an enabler of healthy open source communities. The problem with patronage is that it’s very hard to get a “real” amount of money; I, for one, can’t pay my mortgage on $500/month. Patronage also sets the precedent that you should be a martyr. I think maintaining open source should be profitable.

If you think open source is building your business on semi-abandoned or poorly-maintained public code, you’re doing it wrong.

Every single managed WordPress hosting company is spending tens of thousands of dollars right now to build an automated testing solution for WordPress plugin updates. What if they didn’t have to internalize the cost, but had a means to work together on a common solution? Or, what if those plugin updates were trustworthy in the first place, because each plugin was reliably maintained and supported? The WordPress.org plugins directory has clearly become a tragedy of the commons; WP-CLI, and open source broadly, doesn’t need to be.

Think WP-CLI is cool now? You haven’t seen anything yet. Let’s work on these impossible problems, together.

I’d like to talk with you today about the emotional rollercoaster of maintaining an open source project. More specifically, the emotional highs and lows you’ll experience publishing your code online.

But first, let’s start by taking a look at the bigger picture.

Marc Andreessen, creator of the Netscape web browser, famously said “software is eating the world.” I’d like to posit that it’s actually open source software that’s eating the world, and I have a couple of data points to back me up.

First, a conclusion from the 2015 Future of Open Source survey: “Seventy-eight percent of respondents said their companies run part or all of its operations on OSS and 66 percent said their company creates software for customers built on open source. This statistic has nearly doubled since 2010.”

Second, Nadia Eghbal, who is doing really great research into the economics of open source, calculated that “open source was worth at least $143M of Instagram’s $1B acquisition.”

I think there are a few reasons for this Cambrian explosion of open source usage:

1. Open source is free to use, which means a company can spend money on people (aka innovation) instead of software licenses.
2. There are now a critical mass of reliable open source components, which accelerates your product’s time to market.
3. Open source produces quantitatively better software.
4. Near and dear to me personally, open source permits companies to collaborate on common problems without complicated business agreements.

So open source is pretty huge. But what is it exactly?

“Open source” now means two things.

Clearly, there’s the official definition, a permissive license which grants certain freedoms to the end user.

But when people use “open source” today, they’re probably referring to building and collaborating in public. In fact, they may not care about the license at all — over 80% of projects on Github don’t have an explicit license.

Why are so many people involved in open source? Well, for all of the business reasons covered before. I also think it’s joyful to get to work with people of a variety of cultures and backgrounds. Additionally, open source has given me a sense of permanence to my career, where the job I’ve taken from year to year has not.

There are a couple of different ways you can participate in open source.

Contributing is a form of short-term participation. You make a one-off or twice-off contribution, and then your involvement is over.

Maintaining is taking long-term ownership over a particular aspect of a project. In this equation I’ve produced, maintaining is greater than contributing both in level of reward, but also effort, commitment, and emotional involvement.

Let’s take a walk through the emotional journey of becoming a maintainer.

When thinking about becoming a maintainer, you might be too embarrassed by your code to publish it online. Here’s a little secret: everyone is embarrassed by their code. Being embarrassed by your code is not an excuse not to publish your project and become a maintainer.

In fact, publishing your project is a great excuse to learn. Posting your code online leads to conversations about it you wouldn’t have had otherwise. When people come to use your project, they’ll give you problems to solve that will help you grow as a developer.

Important to note: it’s a long, hard road to mastery — and the road never ends.

As the newly-minted maintainer of an open source project, you may feel discouraged you can’t ever finish your releases. I used to feel this way too. I used to plan a release by adding a bunch of issues to a milestone, and work against the issues until they were all done. However, a few to several to a dozen issues would always delay my October release date into December, January, and February.

With WP-CLI, I release new versions on a time-based schedule, and checklist the steps involved in the release process. Philosophically, I believe users shouldn’t care about which version they’re on, only that they’re on the latest and greatest. In fact, I avoid assigning issues to milestones until they’re done, or if they absolutely need to be fixed.

To streamline the release process, I’ve adopted a consistent release note format, so I never have to think about how they should be written. Similarly, I’ve created a checklist for the release process, and scripted as much of it as possible.

Important to note: wrapping up a release still takes several hours you’ll need to find in your schedule.

As the maintainer of an open source project, you may feel overwhelmed by your issue backlog. As your project becomes more popular, users will open up issues, and this will happen at a greater rate than your ability to close them. At some point, you’ll hit the 400 open issue mark and lose all hope.

In maintaining WP-CLI, I do my best to triage, prioritize, and make decisions. I review the backlog regularly, refining issues to ensure they have sufficient detail, assigning labels as necessary, etc. I prioritize by only assigning myself on a few issues at a time. Lastly, I make decisions — if an issue has been open for two years without any movement, then it’s probably not important to fix.

Important to note: you’ll never get to zero, so you’ll need to come to grips with what is a healthy number of open issues for your project.

As the maintainer of an open source project, you may get frustrated when issues turn into flamewars. Text has a very low emotional density. You and I having a conversation across from one another has high emotional density; we have body language, facial expressions, and vocal intonation to support the words we’re saying. Text-based conversation, with its low emotional density, can easily lead to misunderstandings.

In maintaining WP-CLI, I do my best to be empathetic, respectful, and firm.

First, I do my best to try and understand where the user is coming from. I try to put myself in their shoes, to figure out what they might be meaning that they aren’t necessarily saying.

Second, I’m respectful of the fact they’re using some of their precious time to try and improve my project. If they’re reporting a bug, it may be one that’s sunk a day or two of their time.

Lastly, being firm asserts myself as the authority on the subject, which sets the tone for the conversation and reduces ambiguity.

Important to note: you’ll still need to develop a thick skin.

As the maintainer of an open source project, you may feel overcommitted on your open source involvement. People ask you to do things, and you say yes. Too many yesses lead to stress.

In maintaining WP-CLI, I’ve discovered I need to make myself happy first, and set clear boundaries on my involvement. The best balance I’ve found is 2-5 hours per week, as a part of my normal work schedule. This keeps my involvement a passion, and from feeling too much like work. Because I prioritize the issues I’m working on, I can make regular progress on what I think is most important.

Important to note: commitments are a constant balancing act.

As the maintainer of an open source project, you may feel all alone. This is a current struggle of mine with WP-CLI as I try to find a long-term future for WP-CLI that isn’t wholly dependent on me. As fun as it is to be a benevolent dictator, I’m concerned about the project’s bus factor.

With WP-CLI, I’m shifting my focus to leadership, and identifying opportunities for others to be decision-makers with the project. More specifically, I am:

• Identifying ways for people to be involved in the project that aren’t just code, with specific expectations for those roles.
• Writing more documentation for the project than I think I need, knowing the documentation isn’t for me, who knows the project really well.
• Identifying “good first bugs” as entry points into the codebase.
• Highlighting contributors in release notes (and tweets).

Important to note: You’ll never find all of the contributors you want, so you need to accept and make use of what you have, which can be difficult.

So, where is all of this heading?

WP-CLI is eating WordPress.

WP-CLI is becoming more and more embedded in the WordPress developer experience. It seems like there’s a WP-CLI session at every WordCamp these days.

With the command line, WP-CLI enables doing more with less effort. You can help WP-CLI eat WordPress by writing and maintaining custom commands.

Just like WordPress has plugins, the future of WP-CLI is packages of commands. For this future, I’m trying to proactively solve the problems WordPress has with plugins:

• Where WordPress plugins are considered second-class to what’s included in core, I’d like WP-CLI packages to be considered first-class citizens amongst the commands in WP-CLI.
• All too often, WordPress plugins have just one author. I’d like for each WP-CLI package to have two or three active maintainers.

We’re all aware that open source is an increasingly valuable part of the global economy. In this talk, I hope I’ve conveyed that, emotional rollercoaster aside, maintaining an open source project can be a hugely rewarding part of your career.

When you decide to take the leap, I look forward to saying to you…

Just curious, what made you choose Behat for [WP-CLI] testing rather than PHPUnit like WordPress core, EDD and a lot of other big WordPress plugins?

Is it just for easier readability of tests, or is there more to it?

I have a few projects that need unit testing and am trying to decide what tool to use.

Thanks Bill! Happy to take a swing at answering your question.

But first, let’s take a little step back to understand what is a Behat and what is a PHPUnit.

Behat is “an open source Behavior Driven Development framework for PHP”. Behavior driven development (BDD) is different than test driven development (TDD) in that BDD tests the overall behavior of an application, as opposed to individual units of functionality. For instance, the Behat test for wp option get looks something like this:

When I run `wp option add str_opt 'bar'`
Then STDOUT should not be empty

When I run `wp option get str_opt`
Then STDOUT should be:
  """
  bar
  """

These Behat assertions test the behavior of the application (WP-CLI) because they perform the tests in the same way a user might actually use WP-CLI. For each assertion, the entirety of WP-CLI is loaded and executed, in addition to the command being tested. BDD makes it much easier to say “Yes, WP-CLI is working as the user expects it to work.”

On the other hand, PHPUnit is “a programmer-oriented testing framework for PHP”. PHPUnit is better suited for unit tests, and some forms of integration tests. WordPress has a PHPUnit-based test suite you can use in your own plugin. Writing unit tests (and TDD generally) is different than BDD because you’re writing tests for a more limited scope of the codebase. For instance, the PHPUnit test for get_option() doesn’t reload the entire codebase each time, it only tests the function itself:

function test_the_basics() {
	$key = rand_str();
	$key2 = rand_str();
	$value = rand_str();
	$value2 = rand_str();

	$this->assertFalse( get_option( 'doesnotexist' ) );
	$this->assertTrue( add_option( $key, $value ) );
	$this->assertEquals( $value, get_option( $key ) );
}

Unit tests are typically more precise. Because they execute less of the codebase, you can run hundreds or thousands of unit tests in the time it takes to run one integration test.

Back to the original question: why did I choose Behat over PHPUnit for WP-CLI? Easy answer: I didn’t, scribu did!

In hindsight, I’ve been very happy with the decision because I think Behat / BDD has helped ensure a high degree of quality for WP-CLI. But, if I were to be known for any postulate, it would be:

Tests only get written when they’re easy to write and run.

I’ve typically opted for PHPUnit (and Mocha) tests for plugins and themes because running automated tests against code rendering in a browser requires using a headless browser in your test suite, which adds complexity, which means tests are less likely to be written.

wp plugin install one-time-login --activate && wp user one-time-login <user>

After you run the command, you’ll see a success message like this:

Success: Your one-time login URL is: http://wp.dev/wp-login.php?user_id=1&one_time_login_token=eb6f4de94323e589addb9ad3391883e1d6233bc3

Copy the URL, paste it into your web browser, and… voila!

Feel free to file issues and pull requests against the project on Github.

alias gpo='git push -u origin $(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)'

Four key strokes is way better than 20+. For more of my favorite aliases, check out my dotfiles.

Used appropriately, a persistent object cache like Redis or Memcached can be an incredibly helpful tool for scaling your WordPress site.

Say, for instance, you have an unavoidable query which takes an entire second to run. Or, you need to make an API request to a service that’s notoriously slow. You can mitigate the performance impact in both cases by storing the result of the operation in the persistent object cache, and then using the stored reference when render your response.

Like a fine wine with steak, persistent object caches like Redis or Memcached are best paired with complex data generation. They provide a useful way to store computed data that was expensive to create, and don’t make sense to waste on a cheap meal.

A Mocha + Chai test looks like this:

Pretty simple, huh? But, to get the test to actually run, I had to…

1. Define my dependencies

2. Transpile a separate js-tests file

3. Add a bunch of mumbo jumbo to keep Enzyme from breaking while transpiling

4. Set up a Grunt task to run Mocha

5. Voila!

I’m using Grunt with Webpack because that’s what I copy and pasted from the Feeling RESTful theme (and Grunt is what I’m used to generally).

Let me just say — Thursday, February 4th was pretty darn demoralizing. I spent a huge amount of time in January towards the WP REST API in preparation for what I wanted to do on the command line, and a lot of momentum / inspiration / general good feelings were destroyed in that meeting. As such, I spent much of February and March working on WP-CLI features unrelated to the WP REST API (e.g. package management).

But, I’m back in the saddle. Because I’m 2/3 of the way through one of those fancy WP REST API + React WordPress applications, I’m running into dozens of ways I want to be able to make WordPress more efficiently. And of course, this means doing it on the command line.

Before we proceed: most of the, if not all, RESTful WP-CLI features have required under the hood changes to WP-CLI. You’ll want to wp cli update --nightly to play with this new functionality locally. Once you’ve done so, you can wp package install danielbachhuber/wp-rest-cli to install the latest.

Use --debug and --debug=rest to profile your REST endpoints#

REST APIs are all about speed. Milliseconds matter, and every one you manage to shave off will have a real world impact on user experience.

To make it much, much easier to understand how many queries your endpoint is performing, and how long they take, I’ve added some lightweight profiling to RESTful WP-CLI.

Use --debug to get a summary of your queries for any command.

$ wp rest post list --debug
Debug (rest): REST command executed 7 queries in 0.001954 seconds. Use --debug=rest to see all queries. (1.446s)
+----+-----------------------------+
| id | title                       |
+----+-----------------------------+
| 1  | {"rendered":"Hello world!"} |
+----+-----------------------------+

Use --debug=rest to get the full list of queries executed.

$ wp rest post list --fields=id,title --debug=rest
Debug: REST command executed 7 queries in 0.001696 seconds. Ordered by slowness, the queries are:
1:
  - 0.000291 seconds
  - WP_REST_Posts_Controller->get_items, WP_Query->query, WP_Query->get_posts
  - SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS  wp_posts.ID FROM wp_posts  WHERE 1=1  AND wp_posts.post_type = 'post' AND (wp_posts.post_status = 'publish')  ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 10
2:
  - 0.000257 seconds
  - WP_REST_Posts_Controller->get_items, WP_Query->query, WP_Query->get_posts, WP_Query->set_found_posts
  - SELECT FOUND_ROWS()
3:
  - 0.000256 seconds
  - WP_REST_Posts_Controller->get_items, WP_REST_Posts_Controller->prepare_item_for_response, setup_postdata, WP_Query->setup_postdata, get_userdata, get_user_by, WP_User::get_data_by
  - SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE ID = '1'
4:
  - 0.000244 seconds
  - WP_REST_Posts_Controller->get_items, WP_REST_Posts_Controller->prepare_item_for_response, setup_postdata, WP_Query->setup_postdata, get_userdata, get_user_by, WP_User->init, WP_User->for_blog, WP_User->_init_caps, get_user_meta, get_metadata, update_meta_cache
  - SELECT user_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_usermeta WHERE user_id IN (1) ORDER BY umeta_id ASC
5:
  - 0.000233 seconds
  - WP_REST_Posts_Controller->get_items, WP_Query->query, WP_Query->get_posts, _prime_post_caches
  - SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE ID IN (1)
6:
  - 0.000209 seconds
  - WP_REST_Posts_Controller->get_items, WP_Query->query, WP_Query->get_posts, _prime_post_caches, update_post_caches, update_object_term_cache, wp_get_object_terms
  - SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id  WHERE tt.taxonomy IN ('category', 'post_tag', 'post_format') AND tr.object_id IN (1) ORDER BY t.name ASC
7:
  - 0.000206 seconds
  - WP_REST_Posts_Controller->get_items, WP_Query->query, WP_Query->get_posts, _prime_post_caches, update_post_caches, update_postmeta_cache, update_meta_cache
  - SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (1) ORDER BY meta_id ASC
 (1.598s)
+----+-----------------------------+
| id | title                       |
+----+-----------------------------+
| 1  | {"rendered":"Hello world!"} |
+----+-----------------------------+

Profiling works for any CRUD operation.

$ wp rest post create --title="Test post" --user=daniel --debug
Debug (rest): REST command executed 28 queries in 0.023962 seconds. Use --debug=rest to see all queries. (1.777s)
Success: Created post.
$ wp rest post update 3 --content="Foo bar" --user=daniel --debug
Debug (rest): REST command executed 31 queries in 0.023309 seconds. Use --debug=rest to see all queries. (1.634s)
Success: Updated post.

Hopefully this feature becomes an invaluable part of your REST endpoint development process, as it has mine. Hit me with feedback on its Github issue.

Use wp rest * edit to edit a resource in your system editor#

Most people probably don’t know this, but you can use wp post edit <id> to edit post content in your system editor (e.g. vim). Now, with wp rest * edit, you can edit any REST resource in your system editor.

$ wp rest post edit 3 --user=daniel

When you run wp rest * edit, RESTful WP-CLI fetches the resource, transforms it into a YAML document, and puts it in your system editor:

---
date: 2016-04-14T14:02:57
date_gmt: null
password:
slug:
status: draft
title:
  raw: Test post
  rendered: Test post
content:
  raw: Foo bar
  rendered: |
    |
        <p>Foo bar</p>
excerpt:
  raw:
  rendered: |
    |
        <p>Foo bar</p>
author: 1
featured_media: 0
comment_status: open
ping_status: open
sticky: false
format: standard
categories:
  - 1
tags: [ ]

If you make changes to any of the fields, then the command sends it back to WordPress (through the WP REST API) to update.

On WordPress installs that support Basic Auth, editing also works over HTTP:

$ wp --http=http://daniel:daniel@wordpress-develop.dev rest post edit 1

Et, voila.

Get involved

I’d love your input on the dozens of ideas I have for a more RESTful WP-CLI:

• Render the help docs in formats like API Blueprint and Swagger [#36]
• Introduce wp rest * generate to generate mock data in the format your application expects [#55].
• Introduce wp rest * diff to be able to diff the state of two different WordPresses, a la Dictator [#56].
• Figure out an elegant aliases implementation, so --http=http://daniel:daniel@wordpress-develop.dev becomes @wpdev [#2039]

And I want to hear your ideas too! As well as any feedback, questions, or violent dissent. Let’s chat on Github.

https://gist.github.com/danielbachhuber/d1a97ceab65e7e7a17ba8182cb8c2e00

I heard back from our developers, and it looks like this issues stems from not sending invoices directly from Harvest. It sounds like you might be copying the web invoice link and sending that to your clients, then marking the invoices as sent manually.

The problem with this, is our Stripe integration relies on a Sent invoice to generate an email address to be used for payment. This is compounded by the fact that we have per-user invoice links now. The invoice link you’re copying is from your own account, and when someone else visits that link, Harvest think it’s your email address viewing it.

To fix this, you’ll simply need to send your invoices directly from Harvest normally. If that’s not the case, let me know and we can take a closer look!

So, if you use Harvest, I guess you shouldn’t do that.

I pretty much love React at this point, and can’t imagine using WordPress’ theming for anything in the future. If you hire me to build a brochure website, I will probably build it in React, just because.

What I like most is that everything is so damn elegant. The component-based architecture encourages you to think about whatever you’re building in terms of reusable pieces. I suspect this naturally lends itself to Better Quality Code.

But, React is also a substantial departure from WordPress’ quick and dirty ethos. A concern of mine is long-term maintainability of a React-based website, particularly for clients who think they’re getting a WordPress website and expect to be able to hire a WordPress developer for future changes to it.

Routing is painful. I haven’t found an elegant solution to the fact that routes need to be declared in WordPress and in React.

For the project I’m on, all routes are going into React first so the application works as expected. At some point, I’ll need to figure out how equivalent routes should be sustainably registered as WordPress rewrites.

The theory is that single page applications deployed as WordPress themes can use WordPress to serve response headers, social / SEO meta, and prepare an initial payload of data using the main query, before passing on the torch to React. In practice, I’ve worked very little of this out yet.

Or, I can noop WordPress’ route handling entirely, but then I’ll lose some of the benefit of having WordPress serving the initial pageload.

Which brings me to managing application state. Once you get over the day of effort to understand how Redux works, it’s really quite elegant. It also takes about 50% more effort than I’d like to get my application data into my components.

If I may make one request, could someone please write a redux-wp library to magically generate actions and reducers from my WP REST API index?

If you’re curious what real-world WP REST API endpoint registration looks like, here’s the Controller for a Record which, in the LMS data model of students completing activities and quizzes, stores the data of a student’s answers to an activity or quiz.

https://gist.github.com/danielbachhuber/2b3ed549beb0984e2070979370a8650b

Commentary on my code, in no particular order, includes:

• I’m not sure why I’m using register_rest_field() when I’m already subclassing and have access to the schema. I should probably refactor that.
• Make sure to register your fields before your routes, if you’re using the helpers to transform schema into route args. This bit me once.
• While it’s nice I can use a filter to modify the behavior of WP_REST_Posts_Controller->get_items(), aforementioned method is impossible to subclass.
• The REST API’s concept of context (e.g. embed vs. view vs. edit) is mostly useless in my case, because I’m always fetching the entirety of the resource. I would like for a way to easy disable the concept of context. Also, we should’ve gone with title and title_rendered instead of creating a title object on the Post resource.
• Using arg_options always feels really awkward, because registering a schema property seems like it should be equivalent to registering a query parameter or anything else. I want to be able to use validate_callback, default, and others as top-level arguments to registering a schema property.

Generally, I consider the WP REST API controllers to be good, but not great, right now. I’m writing lots of tests for cases I don’t think I should need to write tests for, because the WP REST API is a bit leaky. For instance, I’d expect for my declaration of query params and schema to be the canonical truth of what the endpoint supports, which isn’t the case currently (e.g. you can deregister the password field on a Post-derived resource, and password will still be included in the response object).

In my ideal world, to create a custom post type endpoint, I would:

• Extend WP_REST_Posts_Controller.
• Define the shape of my resource (e.g. its schema)
• Declare which operations the resource supports (list, get, create, update, delete) through some means where I didn’t have to extend register_routes()
• Declare which query params the resource supports.
• Implement permissions checks as needed.

Leave me any questions you have in the comments! Or, better yet, write about the real-world lessons you’ve learned.

To perform a more atomic deploy, use DeployHQ to deploy your project to a deploy directory, and then run a post-deploy copy command to move your files where they need to be.

As you can see, I’m trialling ServerPilot for managing servers. More on that later, possibly.

For the longest time, I was a staunch proponent of writing my own meta boxes, each and every time. Then I discovered Fieldmanager, and never looked back.

Field definition is a gateway drug for modeling WordPress data. And, in the WP REST API, the better WordPress data is modeled, the more clients can do with it.

Right about now seems like a good time to get official feedback on WP REST API from @wordpress’s lead developers and committers. Just sayin'

Helen, a lead WordPress developer, replied with:

Where does this feedback go, how is it structured, what makes it “official”, and how binding is anything that is said?

To which I replied:

maybe: 1) make/core or personal blog posts 2) I have suggestions 3) comes from your voice 4) actual goal: build consensus

There’s a lot of background to this exchange. If it doesn’t make sense to you, first read this WP Tavern post and then read this Post Status post. The tldr: we’re at a juncture for the WP REST API (a good thing!) where we’ve completed a ton of work (four years for Ryan, in fact) and need to make decisions on whether it’s ready to be merged, or needs additional work before merge consideration.

And we need to make these decisions as a group. Of individuals. With very different: backgrounds, opinions, experience levels with the REST API, and experience levels with other APIs. I’m sure you all know how group decision making goes.

Before we make decisions though, it would be incredibly helpful to have as much information on the table as possible — so everyone can know all sides of the decisions we need to make. This is why I publicly requested “official” feedback on the WP REST API from the WordPress project’s lead and contributing developers:

The feedback doesn’t need to be of any particular form. Jeremy Felt already posted his, which is A+, very much appreciate. And, we (Ryan, Rachel, Joe and I) would love constructive feedback from anyone and everyone — but WordPress’ lead developers and committers are the ones who will be maintaining this project for the long term.

If you’re looking for inspiration on how to get started, I typically try to frame my feedback as:

• What I like.
• What I’d like to see improved.

Both of these could cover:

• What you like about the features the REST API supports, and which features you think are a priority to add before merge (and after).
• Of our documentation, what topics you find explained well, and which should we focus our efforts to improve upon.
• Of our codebase, what abstractions and patterns you find delightful, and which you think are confusing.
• What you like about how we’ve conducted the project so far, and what changes you think we need make for the next six months to be successful, and the twelve months after that.

Ultimately, “should we merge it?” is a binary decision. But, getting as many perspectives as possible out in the open will help us better explore the potential ramifications of the decision, which is more important than the decision itself.

If you don’t want to post on your personal blog, then leaving a comment on this post is a great place for your feedback. Thanks in advance!

Like my title? Get the pun? Te he he.

I’m just back from A Day of REST, where I spoke about a more RESTful WP-CLI, and unlocking the potential of the WP REST API at the command line. It was probably the best talk I’ve ever done. You can check out my annotated slides if you haven’t already.

The talk covered the progress I’ve already made, and the hypotheticals on my mind every day when I go for a swim.

wp-rest-cli v0.1.0

Today marks v0.1.0 for wp-rest-cli. This initial release makes WP REST API endpoints available as WP-CLI commands. It does so by:

• Auto-discovering endpoints from any WordPress site running WordPress 4.4 or higher.
• Registering WP-CLI commands for the endpoints it understands.

Warning: This project is at a very early stage. Treat it as an experiment, and understand that breaking changes will be made without warning. The sky may also fall on your head.

Here’s how it works:

$ wp rest
usage: wp rest attachment <command>
   or: wp rest category <command>
   or: wp rest comment <command>
   or: wp rest meta <command>
   or: wp rest page <command>
   or: wp rest pages-revision <command>
   or: wp rest post <command>
   or: wp rest posts-revision <command>
   or: wp rest status <command>
   or: wp rest tag <command>
   or: wp rest taxonomy <command>
   or: wp rest type <command>
   or: wp rest user <command>

$ wp --http=demo.wp-api.org rest tag get 65 --format=json
{
  "id": 65,
  "link": "http://demo.wp-api.org/tag/dolor-in-sunt-placeat-molestiae-ipsam/",
  "name": "Dolor in sunt placeat molestiae ipsam",
  "slug": "dolor-in-sunt-placeat-molestiae-ipsam",
  "taxonomy": "post_tag"
}

Notice how you can use --http=<domain> to interact with a remote WordPress site.--http=<domain> must be supplied as the second argument to be used. Without it, wp-rest-cli will look for endpoints of a WordPress site in a directory specified by --path=<path> (or the current directory, if--path=<path isn’t supplied).

Using wp-rest-cli requires the latest nightly build of WP-CLI, which you can install withwp cli update --nightly. Once you’ve done so, you can install wp-rest-cli withwp package install danielbachhuber/wp-rest-cli.

Unreleased WP-CLI improvements

Wait, wp package install. What in the?

That’s right, WP-CLI now has package management. Using wp cli update --nightly, you now can:

• wp package browse to browse packages available for installation.
• wp package install to install a given package.
• wp package list to list packages installed locally.
• wp package uninstall to uninstall a given package.

While I wasn’t planning to dive down this rabbit hole during the Kickstarter project, I was finally inspired on how to finish the feature, and took a couple hours yesterday to do so. It’s amazing how you can be mentally blocked on a problem for literally two years but then, once you’re unblocked, finish it up in a short period of time.

You’ll probably run into one or more bugs with wp package. When you do, please let me know on this issue. If the bugs get too hairy, I may pull the feature from the release and revisit. But, for now, you can much more easily install and use community packages.

wp-rest-cli also makes use of another new feature: register arbitrary functions, closures, and class methods as WP-CLI commands.

For instance, given a closure $hook_command:

$hook_command = function( $args, $assoc_args ) {
    // the meat of the command
};
WP_CLI::add_command( 'hook', $hook_command, array(
    'shortdesc' => 'List callbacks registered to a given action or filter.',
    'synopsis' => array(
        array(
            'name'        => 'hook',
            'type'        => 'positional',
            'description' => 'The key for the action or filter.',
        ),
        array(
            'name'        => 'format',
            'type'        => 'assoc',
            'description' => 'List callbacks as a table, JSON, or CSV. Default: table.',
            'optional'    => true,
        ),
    ),
) );

Then, when you run wp hook init, you’ll see:

$ wp hook init
+---------------------------------+----------+---------------+
| function                        | priority | accepted_args |
+---------------------------------+----------+---------------+
| create_initial_post_types       | 0        | 1             |
| create_initial_taxonomies       | 0        | 1             |
| wp_widgets_init                 | 1        | 1             |
| smilies_init                    | 5        | 1             |
| wp_cron                         | 10       | 1             |
| _show_post_preview              | 10       | 1             |
| rest_api_init                   | 10       | 1             |
| kses_init                       | 10       | 1             |
| wp_schedule_update_checks       | 10       | 1             |
| ms_subdomain_constants          | 10       | 1             |
| maybe_add_existing_user_to_blog | 10       | 1             |
| check_theme_switched            | 99       | 1             |
+---------------------------------+----------+---------------+

Want to use this command locally? Update to the nightly, and then runwp package install danielbachhuber/wp-hook-command.

What’s next

Well… I’ve spent a ton of hours over the last month on the WP REST API. 67.03 hours of 83 budgeted, to be precise. Given there doesn’t yet seem to be an end in sight, I may reallocate ~30 hours or so out of the WP-CLI budget for continued involvement with the WP REST API. But, I do need to slow down the pace of my involvement a bit, because it’s not sustainable.

On the wp-rest-cli front, the product problems at the top of my mind are authentication and aliases.

Instead of:

wp --http=demo.wp-api.org --user=daniel:daniel rest tag create

I’d much prefer:

wp @wpapi tag create

In the example preceeding, @wpapi is an alias for both the target and authentication.

In this hypothetical universe, aliases would also be injected into the WP-CLI runtime:

$ wp @wpapi
usage: wp @wpapi attachment <command>
   or: wp @wpapi category <command>
   or: wp @wpapi comment <command>
   or: wp @wpapi meta <command>
   or: wp @wpapi page <command>
   or: wp @wpapi pages-revision <command>
   or: wp @wpapi post <command>
   or: wp @wpapi posts-revision <command>
   or: wp @wpapi status <command>
   or: wp @wpapi tag <command>
   or: wp @wpapi taxonomy <command>
   or: wp @wpapi type <command>
   or: wp @wpapi user <command>

There’s a bit of thinking to do, and code to write, to get from here to there, though.

Feeling inspired? I want to hear from you! Particularly if you’ve written custom endpoints I can test against. Please open a Github issue with questions, feedback, and violent dissent, or email me directly.

A more RESTful WP-CLI is about unlocking the potential of the WP REST API at the command line. But what does this actually mean? Let me begin with a story…

Migrations used to really suck.

Back in the olden days, there was a web interface for mapping users before import. Imagine having dozens of files to import, each with hundreds of users to map. This nightmare is how I started out.

At the beginning of my career I helped run CoPress, a hosting company which helped move student newspaper websites to WordPress. Intelligently, we had a Python conversion script to transform College Publisher archives to WordPress WXR. Not very intelligently, we uploaded those WXR files through the web. CM Life was the largest import I had to work on.

“Hey Brian, about a third of your archives have been imported into your site. To finish this process, however, we’ll need to take the site down for up to a couple of hours, or turn off comments and have you not publish anything at least. The technical explanation is that the import script is being shut down by Apache halfway through the import process because it’s taking a longer time to check the incoming content against the database.”

Fast-forward a few years later. When I joined Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP team, they had a directory full of really useful bin scripts with really inconsistent usage instructions. One of those bin scripts was Thorsten Ott’s CLI wrapper for the WordPress importer.

Thorsten also introduced me to WP-CLI. Driven by the desire to have a consistent interface for the bin scripts, I contributed his CLI wrapper upstream to WP-CLI. And thus, what used to take hours through the web, suddenly took minutes or seconds at the command line.

But migrations still kinda suck.

The ideal WXR import requires a fresh, empty site and script execution without errors. If you import into an existing site, or your script fatals, your data can be broken without you realizing. Furthermore, WXR doesn’t handle custom database tables or site configuration.

Let’s leave this problem of migrations for a bit and get back to a more RESTful WP-CLI.

WP-CLI is a command line interface for anything you might do in the WordPress admin (create, edit, and delete posts, comments and users). It also provides useful WordPress-related commands, for instance:

• wp site empty empties your site of posts, comments, and terms while leaving options and users. Useful if you want to reset the content in your database, without resetting site configuration.
• wp search-replace is a serialization-friendly search-replace.

WP-API also provides commands (endpoints) for managing WordPress. Given these similarities, which I see as an opportunity, last fall I ran a Kickstarter for “A more RESTful WP-CLI.”

A more RESTful WP-CLI is a WP-CLI that’s backed by the WP REST API. In this model, WP-CLI is both a client and an application. As a client, the functionality is in the REST API endpoints, and WP-CLI exists as a user-friendly wrapper over the API. As an application, the functionality is in WP-CLI, built on top of the WP REST API.

More specifically, the RESTful WP-CLI will comprise: endpoint discovery, command registration, authentication, and meta operations. It’s important to note I’m only 18% of the way through the project, though. Some points are concrete, but a lot are still hypothetical.

Let’s look at some code!

Conveniently for us, WP-API describes itself in the index with context=help. This is sufficient description to create WP-CLI commands based on what the site supports. But how do we register WP-CLI commands?

Historically, a WP-CLI command is a class method passed $args and $assoc args. $args represents positional arguments. $assoc_args represent associative arguments. With those supplied values, the method then performs some procedural logic.

Metadata about the command is included in a special PHPDoc format. Short description is at the top. The synopsis defines accepted parameters, which can be positional or associative. Both types can be optional. Lastly, a description can be included for each argument.

WP-CLI then parses the PHPDoc to turn it into synopsis it can understand.

Last year, I set about building a prototype of commands based on the WP REST API. If defining a class is the only way to register a WP-CLI command, then creating dynamic WP-CLI commands required defining a new class at runtime. Super ugly.

It would be much nicer to be able to register an arbitrary callback as a command. This callback can be a closure, function, or method of an instantiated class. Include your description and synopsis as secondary arguments. And this feature is coming in v0.23.0!

With our new functionality in place, we can much more easily register commands dynamically. Much nicer than the eval hack! RESTCommand class supports list_items, create_item, etc.

Boom. Totally dynamically generated from the API for wordpress-develop.dev

It even works for remote sites too! That’s the whole point. Include –http= to access rest endpoints from an arbitrary remote site.

Here’s how you can list tags locally.

I can create tags locally too, through the REST API. But, there’s new behavior: requires authentication and authorization locally. WP-CLI currently offers unfettered access to the database. In the future, we’ll likely have a sudo mode.

Documentation populates from the schema - dynamically! This will become more detailed over time.

Because WP-CLI knows how to interpret the index, parameters are validated before the request is made - dynamically!

But, remote authentication hasn’t been worked out yet.

The goal for authentication is to make it as easy as possible. Authenticate once, and reuse (cache) that authentication until it expires. Switch between multiple authorizations. For the project, there are a couple of options I’ll be exploring: http and ssh.

http auth would include basic, oAuth 1 and 2, and API key - whatever the remote site supports. http is advantageous because it’s more accessible, but runs the limitation of web server requests.

We could also proxy over SSH, when it’s available. SSH auth -> discovery of the remote wp install -> discovery of endpoints -> perform a command.

Two problems: don’t want to type long commands, each site will support different endpoints.

To address these problems, I’m considering ways to introduce aliases, as internal shortcuts for additional global params. Ideally, WP-CLI should only expose commands supported on a specified WordPress instance. Aliases provide UX for this feature, but backwards compatibility is a concern.

All of the work up to this point is foundational, though. WP-CLI as an application means meta operations, or commands to manipulate core resources. For instance, wp diff could compare two JSON blobs. The diffing mechanism is easy, and we can now know they’re equivalent blobs because WP-API defines canonical routes.

Why do all of this? Short of a mind to WordPress connection, WP-CLI’s goal is to be the fastest interface for WordPress. Anything you might want to do to WordPress, WP-CLI should always be, quantatively, the fastest way to perform the task. Furthermore, creating a common interface for disparate features means you can develop mental muscle memory for getting faster with WP-CLI over time.

Thanks!

See you soon, WP REST API crew!

Worked on my Day of REST presentation for a couple hours.

Took a 40 minute run to Tualatin Park; feet were sore which means I probably need new shoes.

Made cottage cheese pancakes for breakfast.

Went to Jordan and Haley’s for Elsie’s first birthday.

Came home, put Ava down for nap.

Made a couple pull requests against WP-API.

Finished installing the second raised bed in the backyard.

Cut down some bamboo.

Neighbor brought over a few pieces of absolutely amazing brisket.

Made steak fajitas, corn tortillas from masa harina, chips from stale tortillas, and guacamole. Had in-laws over for dinner. Drank wine.

Long live the weekend.

1. Lack of GUIDs. Posts, Users, Terms and Comments each have their own auto-incremented IDs, meaning a given ID isn’t unique within the system.
2. Stores PHP-serialized data in the database.
3. Uses absolute paths for resources, instead of relative, which can be located in PHP-serialized data.

It seems every advanced abstraction on top of WordPress ultimately spends 90% of its time finding a solution for these problems.

[caption id="" align=“alignnone”] I was 173 pounds long ago, and have been in the 180 range for the last couple years[/caption]

I’ve “tried” and failed to lose weight in the past many times. “Tried”, in quotes, because I didn’t actually have a strategy. Mind power, I guess? This time has been the only time I’ve effectively lost weight, and I attribute success exclusively to tracking calories.

Want to lose weight too? Use an app like MyFitnessPal to establish a goal, and meticulously track every single calorie you eat. Every single calorie on every single day. I’ve worked out (30+ minutes of cardio) 3 to 6 days per week my entire life, and calorie tracking is the only way I’ve ever lost weight.

Huge props to Albert Sun for helping me realize I can lose weight too.

It would be cool to have a utility plugin that loads theme-specific plugins into the Manage Plugins view and WordPress update check.

https://gist.github.com/danielbachhuber/0f991d150067d8a332ec

It would be cool if someone wrote a WordPress theme (or plugin) to automatically generate a documentation site from a WP REST API index — and the only configuration parameter was the URL to the endpoint.

And so the journey begins. As with most journeys, I have a mixture of emotions: excitement, anticipation, trepidation, and eagerness. Although the destination may be far away, I know I can get there as long as I consistently take steps in the right direction.

Today marks the formal kickoff of my Kickstarter project, “A more RESTFul WP-CLI”. To celebrate the occasion, I’ve launched a project page to capture high-level goals and document my progress along the journey. I’ll keep it updated as I write blog posts every couple or few weeks. Consider these blog posts both a development log and an invitation to participate — I look forward to your comments, issues and pull requests.

For the past month or so, the question at the top of my mind has been: what does it mean to “unlock the potential of the WP REST API at the command line”? Or, even more broadly, why do this project?

These are big questions, and I consider myself fortunate to be able to explore them over the next six months or so. Here’s how I’ve unpacked them so far, in a series of loosely connected ideas:

• WP-CLI’s goal is to be, quantitatively, the fastest interface for developers to manage WordPress. For anything you want to do with WordPress, using WP-CLI should save you multitudes of time over doing it some other way.
• WP-CLI and WP REST API both offer CRUD interfaces to WordPress resources. wp post list is more or less GET /wp/v2/posts. But, wp widget list doesn’t yet have an equivalent in WP REST API. We still have a ton of work to do.
• Building the WP REST API has been, and will continue to be, an exercise of modeling how WordPress works to a consistent (RESTful) interface. Furthermore, this model is declared in a common language for clients to interpret.
• At some point in the future, WP-CLI will be able to ditch a substantial amount of its internals when it can use the WP REST API as its interface to WordPress. WP-CLI can continue to serve as the fastest way for developers to manage WordPress, offering higher-level meta operations like generate, (push|pull), and clone in addition to being a seamless command line interface to WordPress internals.
• As WordPress developers write new endpoints for the WP REST API, it will be quite powerful to have those endpoints instantly accessible through the command line, and as accessible as core resources. For instance, where WP-CLI currently has the wp post * commands, WP-CLI requires Easy Digital Downloads to produce its own wp edd * commands.
• It appears to be supremely possible to deliver this project as a series of improvements to WP-CLI, shipped over one or more versions in the next couple of quarters.

Lots of threads to pull on.

I’m starting development by working towards making wp tag list work interchangably with local and remote sites. Doing so already raises a few issues:

• WP-CLI needs to be easier to register commands on the fly. In my prototype, I had to eval() a dynamically generated class. It would be much nicer to be able to register an arbitrary function, closure, or method as a WP-CLI command.
• When we register REST endpoints to WP-CLI on the fly, there’s the potential for them to conflict with existing commands. Furthermore, the endpoints will vary from site to site. Ideally, the commands you see should represent the commands available on the target site. I think site aliases may offer us a backwards-compatible implementation; for instance, specifying an alias like wp @prod would only expose commands available on production.
• Remote calls will need authentication. Ideally, it should be possible to authenticate once through a supported protocol (basic, oAuth1, API key, etc.), and store these authentication details somewhere on the file server. This is potential rationale for a config management command. If you aren’t blocking web requests to wp-cli.yml and wp-cli.local.yml already, you should be.

HTTP DIGEST authentication (Wikipedia) permits more secure communication between the client and server over insecure HTTP. It’s also a fair bit more challenging to implement, for a couple of reasons:

1. Every API call actually requires two HTTP requests. Although the first request will fail with 401 Unauthorized, it returns a www-authenticate response header with values critical for signing the second request.
2. Sending the second request requires creating a signature with several variables where the order matters. Because of the number of variables (pun intended), debugging authentication failures can be very frustrating.

To make HTTP DIGEST authentication requests easier in WordPress, here’s a function you can use:

https://gist.github.com/danielbachhuber/6c09dd2fcd1a9c4ef252

richard.tape [8:19 AM] anyone used wocker? I’m looking to set up a dev environment that I can share with someone else so they’re able to more easily help me debug a problem and I want to modify the base containers and then package the whole thing up so I can just pass that to them and they just spin it up and are in the same shape I’m in… ideas?

wp backup would create a tarball of the database, WordPress files, and (optionally) the uploads directory. wp restore could then read said tarball, and expand it to a working WordPress install.

We could even potentially parse the original wp-config.php into a manifest file, which would permit the restoration process to override some details.

• Instead of relative paths, WordPress stores full URLs in the database, in many different columns and tables.
• These URLs, along with other data, can be stored as PHP-serialized blobs. Because PHP serialization includes the string length in the blob, replacing one value with another value of a different length also needs to update the encoding as well.

WP-CLI’s search-replace command addresses both of these problems for you, with its awareness of WordPress’ tables, and intuitive handling of serialized data.

Last month, Pantheon generously sponsored 15 hours of my time to address some of the long-standing bugs in the backlog, and make a few substantial enhancements too. On Pantheon, wp search-replace is an integral part of the Pantheon Workflow.

Let’s take a look at how search-replace works, and then we’ll review the new features coming in WP-CLI v0.22.0.

Making search-replace an integral part to your workflow

WP-CLI search-replace only requires two parameters: <old-string> and <new-string>. On Pantheon, here’s how it could be used to transform a database cloned from Live into Test:

wp search-replace 'production-domain.com' 'test-my-site.pantheon.io'

By default, WP-CLI searches through all tables registered to the $wpdb object. In each column of each table, it first inspects the column’s rows to see if serialized data is present. If it discovers serialized data, then it iterates through all of the rows, de-serializes data as relevant, recursively performs a search and replace procedure, and updates the row in the database. When no serialized data is present in any of the rows, the replacement procedure is a much simpler MySQL UPDATE statement.

On multisite, WP-CLI defaults to performing search-replace on a single site. You can search-replace across all sites in the network with the --network flag.

wp search-replace 'production-domain.com' test-my-site.pantheon.io '--network'

Want to inspect the results of your search-replace command without making changes to the database? Use the --dry-run flag to mock the entire operation, and see a summary of how your database would’ve been modified.

Pantheon’s sponsored improvements to search-replace

Here are a few of the improvements you can expect to see in the forthcoming WP-CLI v0.22.0:

• A huge performance boost! Instead of running a MYSQL LIKE statement every 1000 rows, WP-CLI now just runs it once. On a post meta table of ~3.5 million rows where 75,610 rows were affected, this change improved execution time from 734.926s to 225.509s (3.3x faster).
• Use the --export=<filename> argument to create a SQL file of your transformed data, instead of making updates to the database. This is a helpful feature when you want to prepare a database for a new environment without having to import and then run search-replace.
• Wildcards can be used in table names. search-replace against meta tables with wp search-replace <old-string> <new-string> '*meta*'. Note: the table pattern needs to be quoted, as * is a special character in Bash.
• Execution time is indicated when running search-replace with the --verbose flag, in case you’re curious to see how long each replacement operation is taking.

Happy to see these new features? Please share the love on Twitter :)

The primary reason for this? I want to blog more often. The writing interface in WordPress.com is now much, much better than what you get in a standard WordPress install. Plus, there’s also something to be said about not having the mental overhead of site management every time you go to write a blog post.

This domain’s history: switched from 1&1 to WebFaction in June 2009, to Slicehost in May 2010, back to WebFaction in September 2010, to WordPress.com in November 2011, to Digital Ocean in March 2014, and back to Webfaction in January 2015.

I am a white, privileged male who grew up in an upper middle class family. I didn’t have to work in high school, and my college would’ve been completely paid for, had I chosen to complete it. I live in a comfortable house in well-developed suburbs, with easy access to many local services. I identify as fiscally conservative, socially progressive, and think politicians are a bunch of schmucks (so you could probably call me libertarian).

As someone of privilege, I try to refrain from discussing controversial topics on the web. All too often they devolve into a flame war, “a heated argument between two individuals, that results in those involved posting personal attacks on each other during or instead of debating the topic at hand.” But, as a maintainer of several open source projects and active contributor to many others, codes of conduct have a direct impact on my daily life.

I do believe in the golden rule, and do my best to treat others as I wish to be treated. I think communities, online and off, can benefit from explicitly stated expectations of behavior — even more so when leadership role models ideal conduct. I also understand it’s difficult to regulate away human behavior, and take an active concern with who holds the power to enforce rules. Power is a real thing. Lastly, I know that if a conversation turns into personal attacks, it can be effective to explicitly address emotions — “it hurts me when you say…” — because it brings empathy to the forefront.

Text-based communication, particularly as we practice it on the internet, is really hard. Let me say that again for emphasis: t****ext-based communication is really hard. Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin have a great podcast episode about emotional density, which conveys many of my thoughts on the subject. In short, text loses many of the voice intonation and body language nuances we humans actually use to communicate. Think about it this way: text is a medium where 2/3 of packets are lost in transmission. If we chose to collaborate on the web, this is a constraint we must acknowledge and embrace.

Be nice to others. Go out of your way to be helpful. And, if someone flames you, understand they might be operating a computer without their first cup of coffee for the day.

Smarter Featured Gallery

By default, the topmost UI element on each homepage will display the most recent published post. In the Customizer, the Pottery Barn team can choose one or more posts for promotion with an AJAX post selection tool (plugin in-progress). If multiple posts are selected, then the UI element turns into a carousel (powered by Slick).

Look ma, no checkboxes!

Magical Pin Promotion

Further down the homepage, the Pottery Barn team wanted to promote their top Pins from Pinterest. Rather than create a more complicated workflow of uploading images and completing multiple fields per Pin, I decided to magically pull in Pin metadata from their Open Graph / Twitter Card tags.

Drop a link in — voila!

If you’re considering a similar approach, here are a few technical details I worked out:

• Rather than make a number of on-going frontend HTTP requests, I decided to fetch the metadata when the links are saved, and store it in options.
• Pinterest will block your IP address if it thinks you’re a bot. If your code mysteriously stops working, you might want to check the response.
• Pinterest’s Twitter Card image source is better to work with than Facebook Open Graph because Pinterest forcefully crops the Open Graph image to a Facebook-friendly proportion. The Twitter Card image source appears to be the original proportion.

The image should be the visualization.

It would be really neat if I could verify a migration with WP-CLI. Using the WXR file as the baseline, the command would iterate through all of the data in the file, compare it to what’s present in WordPress, and alert me if anything is missing or unexpectedly different.

What a year. It’s hard to imagine life moving any faster — and then it does. Having a second kid is parenting squared.

Wait a sec… I haven’t blogged about my son yet. Hey, Charlie!

Charles Edward Bachhuber was born at home on December 16th, 2015 weighing 9 pounds 6 ounces. He’s a total bundle of joy. Leah, Ava, and I are proud to welcome him to the family, and can’t wait to share our world with him.

Here are some of the highlights of the year from Instagram:

Professionally-speaking

There were two big points to my career this year: joining Fusion (May), and then leaving (November). Yeah yeah, thanks for the jokes about me holding down a full-time job.

I joined Fusion because I’ve always wanted to work for a news organization. It seemed like the prime opportunity to build a distributed technology team within a startup media company. But, as I discovered, sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to.

Fusion was a great “Intro to Management” experience. In hindsight, I can safely say I had no idea what I was getting into. And now I know! But it took me a half year of experience in the role, and consuming dozens upon dozens of blog posts, podcasts, and books, to fully appreciate how a management role is different than what I’ve historically done.

The takeaway I can share in a sentence: distributed and co-located teams don’t mix. Companies with both a physical office and remote employees absolutely need to operate as though everyone is distributed. Without this commitment, many things break in many frustrating ways. And, learning to be a manager in this context is incredibly difficult.

Since November, I’ve been back in the saddle with Hand Built. Business is going well. Notably, I helped PBS Frontline launch their new website, and built a new blog for Pottery Barn. I also have a number of potential projects in the hopper for 2016.

What I’m most proud of professionally, though, is how much time I get to spend contributing to open source. In 2015, this turned out to be 12.26% of all tracked time (282 hours). On behalf of Hand Built, this was 128 hours towards WP-API, 60 hours towards WP-CLI, and 13 hours towards WordPress core.

Jet-setting

Travel slowed way down for me this year — and I didn’t make MVP Gold on Alaska. According to TripIt, here’s the tally for 2015 compared to 2014 and 2013:

• 15 trips over 62 days (2014: 18 trips over 90 days; 2013: 24 trips over 139 days).
• 48,692 miles flown (2014: 64,193 miles; 2013: 99,228 miles).
• Visited 18 cities in 4 countries (2014: 19 cities in 4 countries; 2013: 33 cities in 8 countries).

Happy (almost) New Year!

It would be an all-in-one device (both camera and display) where I can have an instant-on connection with anyone in the world. And, to get fancy, the optics of the camera would correct for the orientation of the device, such that it would always appear as though I’m having a face-to-face conversation (instead of nose to face or forehead to nose).

A price point of $500 or less would make this a killer device for any company.

Here’s the playlist that kept everyone on the dance floor the entire night:

1. I’m A Believer - The Monkees
2. Baby I Love You - Aretha Franklin
3. Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough - Michael Jackson
4. Brown Eyed Girl - Van Morrison
5. Get Down Tonight - KC & The Sunshine Band
6. Brick House - Commodores
7. Love Shack - The B-52’s
8. At Last - Etta James
9. ABC - Jackson 5
10. Dancing Queen - ABBA
11. Celebration - Kool & The Gang
12. Wild Thing - Tone-Loc
13. Stayin’ Alive — Bee Gees
14. Don’t Stop Believin’ - Journey
15. Mony Mony - Billy Idol
16. Kung Fu Fighting - Cee Lo Green
17. A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got) - Fergie, Q-Tip, GoonRock
18. Cha Cha Slide - Mr. C
19. Gangnam Style - PSY
20. It’s Time To Disco - Vasundhara Das, KK, Shaan
21. Sexy And I Know It - LMFAO
22. Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) - Beyonce
23. Save A Horse (And Ride A Cowboy) - Big & Rich
24. Hava Nagila - The Klezmer Lounge Band
25. Poker Face - Lady Gaga
26. Hello (Feat. Dragonette) - Martin Solveig
27. The Time (Dirty Bit) - The Black Eyed Peas
28. Sweet Caroline - Neil Diamond

Truthfully, people sat down for the Bollywood song. But it wouldn’t be my wedding without Bollywood. For the Hava Nagila, Leah and I actually did end up on chairs. And, if you’ve ever lived in Eugene, you know why we ended with Sweet Caroline.

Good luck!

• Sunday: BBQ at Leah’s mom’s
• Monday: Thai veg curry over rice
• Tuesday: Make your own salad (chicken, red peppers, avocado, etc.)
• Wednesday: Ravioli with chicken basil sausages and brussel sprouts
• Thursday: Beef manicotti
• Friday: Fish tacos (?)

1. Set a clear mission statement for the project. This will give clarity to the problem you’re solving, what to say yes to, and what to say no to. You ideally want to avoid crises of faith late in the project.
2. For your contributors, clarify involvement expectations. When most contributors are doing so in their “free” time (e.g. not getting paid directly for it), it’s really difficult to budget for unlimited development scope. A little bit of proper project management goes a long way. I feel like WP-API is a much more sustainable project with four contributing developers than two. I would encourage you to have at least three.
3. Model your data before writing code. What is a field? What attributes should it have and why? What is a control? What attributes should it have and why? When you dive into development before appropriately modeling your application, you run into these implementation details one by one, and burn a lot of time (waiting to) discuss them.
4. Focus on clearing blockers above all else. Because you’re working on an open source project with contributors across many timezones, average time to feedback will optimistically be 6 hours. More likely, it will be 24-48 hours. This slow feedback cycle can kill progress on pull requests. As a project maintainer, prioritize giving feedback, clearing blockers, and making decisions.

• Today I’m flying to NYC to meet a few new members of the Fusion team in person. Tomorrow we have a hack day on the theme of personalization.
• Friday evening I’m taking the train to Philly for Saturday’s BCNI. I fly back to Portland Saturday evening.
• Home on Sunday.
• On Monday, I’m headed to Napa via SF for the VIP workshop. I’m bringing my running shoes.
• Thursday, I fly to Las Vegas for Loopconf, where I’ll be until Saturday morning.

If our paths intersect, say hello!

On the gear front, I recently picked up a Patagonia Refugio 28L backpack. It passed the test with flying colors on an overnight to SF. One pocket for my laptop, another for clothing, and a third for cables, etc. I can’t underscore how exceedingly awesome it is. Clothing volume-wise, I think it’s going to max out at three night trips unless I pack my reusable undies.

Early last year, I was fired a month before Ava was born, found my dream job, and was laid off a month later (while on my unofficial paternity leave, to boot). It was difficult to stomach the idea of joining another company full-time, so I started my solo consultancy, Hand Built. Through Hong, Fusion became one of my clients and I helped successfully deliver strategic project after strategic project.

I’ve long wanted two opportunities for my career: 1) to write code for an actual media company, and 2) to be able to help foster a work environment I want to be a part of for a long time. Joining Fusion gives me both in spades — to the degree it feels too good to be true. We’re building a distributed team, already represented in New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Toronto, Portland and Mumbai. We open source (almost) everything. And we have tremendous freedom to decide what to build and how to build it. Or, as Davis likes to say, “enough rope to hang ourselves.”

Fusion’s technology team is hiring across the board. Come contribute to our success. If the team sounds like it might be a good fit, shoot me a note at my shiny new email address: daniel.bachhuber@fusion.net

Today we learned:

1. Our offer wasn’t accepted.
2. Not only was our offer not accepted, but it wasn’t even close to being the leading offer. The accepted offer was likely more than $100k over asking price.
3. There were 27 offers on the house. It was on the market for four days in the middle of the week.

Insanity. According to our realtor, RMLS reported the month of March as having the lowest inventory in Portland since September 2005.

Continous Integration for Content

There’s lots of little attributes which define the “quality” of a piece of content — just like there are attributes which define code quality. Developers have continuous integration to run automated checks on their code, but journalists have editors — who are prone to human error. It’s easy and quite common to forget to add a photo credit, or spell the SEO title incorrectly. What are some ways we can automate these errors out of existence? Let’s get together, present some real world “quality” problems to work on, prototype, wireframe, and define algorithms, and then share our results.

Code review takes two

Code review is single-handedly the best way to level up your development skills. It’s also really hard! Let’s discuss code review methodologies as a group, and then pair up to practice.

We had a failed plan (proposed by me) where I would sleep 3-4 hours on Unisom, then take over and Leah would sleep 3-4 hours. I took my pill, then attempted to sleep for a couple of hours while Leah dealt with an often-screaming Ava. She hadn’t taken her morning nap, so she was already a wreck by the time we were on the plane. Not much sleep for me. Then, later, Leah took half of a pill, got an hour and change of downtime while Ava napped in the Ergo, and then had to groggily help me take care of Ava. But, on a positive note, we all slept roughly an hour at the very end of the flight.

Yesterday, we landed at about 9 am, then took the train to our accommodations. It’s a lovely flat in the Jordaan district we found on Airbnb. The owner is the Dutch ambassador to Sudan, and their place is filled with trinkets and pictures of their travels — the perfect place for us.

After a quick two and a half hour nap, we took off for a walk, some lunch, and grocery shopping.

Our lunch was at Pane & Olio, a welcome departure from all of the tourist cafes nearby. Ava had quiche, Leah a prosciutto sandwich, and I a slice of salami pizza. The lunch special, some sort of macaroni dish, looked quite good.

For dinner, I cooked up chicken with sweet potatoes, onions and brussel sprouts. What I love most about Airbnb is that travel accommodation can easily become a home away from home. For us, home-cooked meals are a key ingredient.

Last night wasn’t too bad. We all woke up for a couple of hours around midnight. Ava got to sleep in our bed because we didn’t want her crying to wake up the neighbors. Ava and I woke up around 6:30 am, and Leah slept in until 8 or so.

Leah’s time for the laptop!

Today we: walked to the Van Gogh museum in the morning, came home for naps (me one hour, Leah an hour and a half, and Ava two hours), and went on a canal tour in the afternoon. Dinner was SushiMe — not quite as good as Ichiban ?

This site’s history: switched from 1&1 to WebFaction in June 2009, to Slicehost in May 2010, back to WebFaction in September 2010, and to Digital Ocean last March.

The crust makes or breaks a quiche. We love our friend Riley’s recipe, so much so that Leah pre-makes a half dozen crusts and sticks them in the freezer so we always have one ready.

Ingredients:

• 3 cups flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/4 cup butter, warmed to room temperature
• 1 egg beaten
• 5 tablespoon water, cold
• 1 teaspoon vinegar

Directions:

Mix flour and salt together, then knead in butter. Work until butter is well-mixed. Mix wet ingredients in a separate bowl, then add to other ingredients. Work together. Form into four balls. The dough can be frozen for up to two months. (Makes four crusts)

What do you do in your role at Fusion?

As interim Director of Engineering, I consider my primarily responsibility to be very similar to a janitor — keep the lights on, clean up messes, and make sure things are happening in an orderly manner. And, when they aren’t, I jump in to get things back on track.

For instance, over the past week, I’ve:

• Helped with on-boarding two new full-time employees.
• Reviewed and provided feedback on code written by potential hires on trial.
• Edited job descriptions to go with the positions we’re hiring for.
• Reviewed and deployed code from Fusion’s engineering team.
• Worked with editorial to figure out the best way to do X, Y, or Z
• Stayed up late to build a new feature for editorial, the night before the story ran.
• Wrote code for a variety of bug fixes, feature tweaks, etc.
• Wrote Github issues for problems we want to solve over the next few months, and need product definition and UX for.

Really, it’s anything that needs to be done to keep the team on track and working on the right things.

How does Fusion use agile in its development processes?

Before we make too many assumptions, let me frame the conversation. I think Agile™, as a formal process with right and wrong procedures, is bullshit. To me, agile means the minimum process needed to ship code that exceeds product goals. What that process specifically is depends on the composition of the team and what we’re working on.

Many digital news organizations publish an article when it’s good enough to go, and then revise from there. This is in contrast to print publications, where you can’t edit a story after it’s been printed. In a similar vein, the proper way to ship web software is to deploy your Minimum Viable Product and iterate, fixing bugs and tweaking features. Your development process should foster this process — just like it shouldn’t take 15 minutes for an article edit to appear on your website, it shouldn’t take two hours for your bug fix to make it to production.

Fusion is still experimenting radically with it’s “agile” process. Our two leading tools right now are Slack and Github.

We have two Slack organizations: Fusion Product for technology and product, and Fusion Digital for editorial. Given how easy it is to simply strike up a conversation with anyone, I cannot imagine being in an office of the same number of people, having to go over to someone’s desk, see that they’re not there, etc. etc.

However, Slack comes with costs too. It can be very easy to become overwhelmed by the number of conversations happening that you’re inadvertently following along. Also, text is a low-bandwidth form of communication, where subtlety is lost.

For the technology team, because our work is so closely tied to the products we’re building, Github issues are the best place to have conversations. Currently, we have repos for each product we’re responsible for, as well as a “Fusion for the Future” repo for discussing future projects, and a “Let’s UX This Puppy Up” repo for UX / design requests and our style guide. To add a light project management layer to our repos (e.g. determining which state each issue is in), we are using Huboard.

The goal for our Github repos is that no one should ever have to wonder what’s next to work on. Backlogs should be chock-full of well-scoped issues and features to pick from.

One of Storyful’s biggest problems is communication between departments. How do you overcome this obstacle?

I love this question! It’s right up my alley.

One of my favorite phrases from my days at Automattic is “communication is the oxygen of a distributed company.” Meaning, the success of a company is directly correlated to its ability to communicate. And, if a company is struggling, it’s probably because communication is breaking down in some way.

Given this assumption about the importance of communication, it begs the question: how do you communicate well? For me, it boils down to these things:

1. Use the appropriate medium.
2. Be deliberate in how you speak.
3. Meetings and emails aren’t communication.

Open, archived text should be the default medium for conversation. It’s helpful to have everyone in the company in a communal, synchronous chat application for quick one to one exchanges. If the conversation doesn’t need to be real-time, then there should be an open, archived space for asynchronous communication. Fusion uses O2, the successor to P2, for this. It’s a blog with threaded commenting where anyone can post or easily review past conversations. See Sara Rosso’s presentation for how it’s changed Automattic. Lastly, if the conversation needs to be higher-bandwidth than text, go to audio or video. But a team that communicates well can conduct 90% of its conversations via text.

As an aside, it’s funny to me that Slack is now worth billions of dollars, and has taken over companies like wildfire, because IRC has been around for years. But, I guess that’s what happens when you get the UX right. Many people I’ve seen hesitant with IRC love Slack.

When you do communicate primarily through text, you need to be very deliberate in how you speak — it can be much easier to miscommunicate, because you’re lacking the subtlety you normally get in face to face conversation. Emojis can help with nuance. Screenshots are often worth a thousand words. Taking a pause to edit can greatly increase impact.

I love Michael Pollan’s “food-like substance” phrase because it can be re-used in so many ways. Meetings and emails are “communication-like activities”.

Meetings, because of their coordination costs, should be used sparingly. Just think — six people in a one-hour meeting represents six hours of lost productivity. If you do need the communication bandwidth that comes from meetings, a meeting shouldn’t be allowed to begin until it has an agenda with specific discussion points and a note-taker. These notes should then be archived to your open, archived asynchronous communication space.

Granted, face-to-face interaction is still important for keeping your team human. Fusion’s technology team has twice-weekly standups of 15 minutes or less, and Hangouts as needed. Because we’re a distributed team (currently NYC, Miami, Portland, Philly, and India), we plan to have a couple in-person meetups in 2015 too.

Similarly, emails are blackholes for the information a team needs to be productive. The context and details associated with an important discussion between person A and B is totally lost when person C joins the team. Do you really want to forward your entire email archive when person C joins the team? Or lose institutional knowledge when person A leaves the team? The types of conversations that happen in email can easily be done in Slack, O2, Github issues, or whichever open tool a team chooses to use. Archives are worth their weight in gold.

Scott Berkun wrote a book, “A Year Without Pants”, about his time with Automattic’s distributed culture that many people find a useful introduction.

How should other news organizations implement agile?

Once your communication is like oxygen, agile goes best with a heavy dose of open source software. Let me give you a real-world example.

Last night (Wednesday, December 3rd), Alexis Madrigal pinged me in Slack asking whether Fusion had a native way to embed a PDF in an article. DocumentCloud and Scribd are great, but also subject to DMCA requests. Alexis and Kevin Roose were working on story about the Sony Pictures hack, and wanted to embed a PDF version of a budget at the end of article.

“Give me 30 minutes,” I said. It ended up taking an hour and a half, but I was able to cobble together a solution using Mozilla’s PDF.js and putting the PDF in an Amazon S3 bucket Fusion controls. Thus, any DMCA requests will have to go through Fusion legal. Problem solved, powered by flat, effective communication.

Open source doesn’t just mean using open source software though. It means being a responsible member of the open source communities you’re a part of. And if you use any open source software, you’re a member of its community. Your product is dependent on that software — you want it to be healthy and thrive.

Just like being a good neighbor means picking up trash when you see it, being a good member of an open source community means taking the extra effort to open bug reports or create pull requests. Open source is a tremendous catalyst for software development — aka idea to production in a couple of hours — but it’s an informed, deliberate, and strategic activity.

Whoa, AppleTV is an amazing experience now. My parents had a version one or two several years back which was a bit meh — ok, so I can play the media I already have in my library, or purchase from the iTunes Store. With the addition of AirPlay and content from Netflix, YouTube, and other providers, it’s become much, much better.

Speaking of, Fusion has some real estate in the AppleTV digital storefront (not sure what the appropriate terminology is). When the channel launched in December, I didn’t think much of it. But it’s really neat! And Fusion produces great content. I’ve watched more clips in the past half hour than I’ve watched on the website in the last month.

Experiencing Fusion through AppleTV underscores how version 1.0 this whole post-cable video business is though. I have my iPhone out, and I’m just using it as a remote. The experience could be so much more.

While I’m watching a given clip, I want a synchronized second screen experience where I can dive deeper into the story — videos with links. When the clip is over, I want answers to “what next?” Stories like that of San Pedro Sulas shouldn’t dead end, they should take me deeper into the issue — from informational to educational to empowering.

Integration ideas:

• Every video has a unique URL.
• Web experience for the video is highly visual and interactive — engagement that doesn’t take me 100% away from the video like text does.
• When I visit the video’s web page, I’m promoted to sign in via Facebook or Twitter so Fusion can keep track of the clips I’ve watched and let me follow topics, personalities, or series.
• Like Amazon has on product pages, functionality so I can ask a question of the clip and have the producer or other viewers answer.

It goes without saying: the biggest event in 2014 was the birth of our daughter, Ava Lucille. The past nine months have flown by; watching her experience the world brings new meaning to life. Furthermore, the home birth experience, which Leah wrote about, was amazing, empowering, and priceless for the both of us.

From Instagram, here are some of the highlights:

Professionally speaking

This year has been more, uh, turbulent than others in my career. I started 2014 as a Senior Engineer with Human Made, splitting my time between client services and product. In early February, I was fired. Don’t worry — we’re on good terms, and have since worked together on a couple of projects.

Getting fired turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Later in February, I landed my dream job with Digital First Media. I had grand plans to reinvent digital publishing using open source across DFM’s 100+ properties. But, while on my unofficial paternity leave, my business unit imploded, leaving me without a job again.

When you get fired and laid off within the span of a couple of months, working for yourself becomes incredibly appealing. I announced Hand Built, my WordPress consulting shop offering bespoke development, data migration, code review, and devop services. Since April, I’ve gotten to work with a variety of clients including:

• Airbnb
• Billy Penn
• The Chicago Sun-Times
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Fusion
• Investigative News Network
• The New Republic
• Pantheon

Solid list, huh?

Given my time with Human Made and WordPress.com VIP, I was fortunate to have a good sense of the consulting business. Still, solid advice always helps. Mike Bijon and Boone Gorges were nice enough to give me the rundown on how they operate their businesses (also worth mentioning: Modern Tribe’s freelancer guide). One of Mike’s invaluable tips: target 20 billable hours per week for 48 weeks out of the year, as you’ll likely spend 20 hours or more per week on non-billable admin, sales cycle, etc. In 960 working hours, I need to make all of the revenue I’d like to make in a year, also keeping in mind added costs of benefits and additional tax. This was a great framework for determining how I needed to sell my services.

A highly-relevant aside: I made an early decision to switch from Freshbooks to Harvest. Harvest is so much better than Freshbooks. One of Shane Pearlman’s, uh, pearls is to get religious about time-tracking. Before I started my business, I hated budgeting my time. Work estimates were the last thing I ever wanted to do. Once you get hooked though, you never go back — time-tracking is the only sane way to manage your most valuable resource. Harvest has really awesome Mac and iOS applications for logging hours against projects, and Freshbooks is basically a faff to work with.

Hand Built turned out to be viable. In 2014, I’ve gotten to:

1. Work with (mostly) great clients on (mostly) interesting projects.
2. Be pretty good about working sane hours and having a proper work/life balance.
3. Put in 1,282.72 billable hours and 444.51 non-billable (including open source) hours since March.
4. Prove it’s financially viable to be an independent software developer.

Closing the year, I’m spending the majority of my time with Fusion as interim Director of Engineering. It’s a somewhat of an odd limbo state — Fusion can’t yet extend a full-time offer because they don’t have a business presence in Oregon. If / when they do, I’ll probably accept, as I really enjoy the team and what we’re working on. But the limbo state has its advantages too — I’m on the hook for a fixed number of hours each week, and get to have my side projects.

In 2015, I’d like to improve upon two areas: open source contributions, and my product offerings.

In starting Hand Built, my goal was to spend roughly 25% of my time on open source. Even though I’ve become the maintainer of WP-CLI and a co-leader of WP-API, I’ve a bit fallen short: 28.66 hours on WP-API, 116.17 hours on WP-CLI, and 56.95 hours on other projects including WordPress core. But, this does equal ~12% of my tracked time so I guess I’ve exceeded Matt’s 5% goal. Setting monthly time budgets, as with any client project, is likely the best way to meet the commitment.

When I chatted with Boone, he mentioned 75% of his business comes from recurring, on-going contracts, avoiding one-off pick-up projects. In his opinion, it’s the most viable way to be a solo web developer. My past eight months echo this — the majority of my billable hours are priced hourly and a part of a long-term contract. I’d like to do more code reviews and migrations though, so I need to invest time productizing these offerings, marketing, etc.

Jet-setting

Both Leah and I love to travel. In 2011 and 2012, I managed to hit ~130k miles flown each year. According to TripIt, here’s the tally for 2014 compared to 2013:

• 18 trips over 90 days (2013: 24 trips over 139 days).
• 64,193 miles flown (2013: 99,228 miles).
• Visited 19 cities in 4 countries (2013: 33 cities in 8 countries).

Not quite as impressive, but still pretty good.

Cemre Güngör put together a neat app for visualizing your TripIt profile. Here’s how mine turns out:

Time to go celebrate my sister’s 21st birthday. Happy New Year’s Eve!

While I didn’t really need it, I finally decided to upgrade. Pictured on the left is my new, fully-loaded 13" Macbook Pro. Retina, 3 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, etc. Pictured on the right is my old, yet reliable, 13" Macbook Air. It’ll take a while to collect a similar set of awesome stickers.

Largely because of the SSD and (lack of) weight, my 2011 13" Macbook Air has been the best computer I’ve owned. But, I’ve been envious of the battery life with newer Macs. And, countering the trend of netbooks / everything running in the cloud, I’ve been regularly maxing out my 4 GB RAM.

This Macbook Pro won out over the mythical 12" Macbook Air coming in 2015 because one always needs to be wary of first generation hardware. Using my handy crib notes from October to get everything configured.

The day the iPhone was available, I went to the Apple Store in University Village just to hold one. No commitment. And I went out the door with an iPhone anyway.

I’m writing this post from the WordPress for Android app (which really should be named the WordPress.com / Jetpack upsell app). Two years ago, I tried to make the switch but I just wasn’t ready. Now, I’m mulling making a more gradual switch, having purchased one of the last latest Nexus(i?) for this testing purposes.

As a stranger in a strange land, here’s what I’m running into, in no particular order:

+ Other than the fact I have no idea how to create an unordered list, the WordPress for Android editor is quite nice. + I feel like I’m relearning how to computer with the Android keyboard. Selecting text also feels like it takes three attempts per. + With Ad Block Pro on desktop and Tweetbot on iOS, I almost forgot Twitter had ads. Twitter Android client: ew. + TouchID is conspicuously absent. As is iMessage support and Things. I guess you basically need iOS and Android apps if you want to exist. + It’s mindboggling how Slack has managed to produce a consistent, solid user experience across multiple platforms. Lesson for the rest of us.

Ok, battery just about dead. Back to iOS.

I thought I’d use the opportunity to gauge usability of using it in a project. My feedback is from the perspective of a developer needing to create custom endpoints for WordPress — I haven’t written any client-facing code yet.

These notes are roughly edited. Mostly I just want to get them up before WCSF.

What I like

WP-API has a comfortable implementation of using WP_Error for returning error responses in my endpoint callbacks. Being able to specify the HTTP status code is a great touch.

Extending WP-API’s core classes is really nice for DRY. They should be designed to be extended — I’d suggest they’ll be more commonly extended than used standalone.

For instance, I was able to get a lot of mileage out of extending WP_JSON_CustomPostType and customizing the response values for prepare_post(). However, I basically reset the original array (because the project has different data models), so it would be cool if there was some reusability there.

Also, I was able to easily add an authentication check for get_posts(). But, I wasn’t able bypass delete_post()’s capability check, so I needed to create my own.

Context argument is proving to be easily reusable. I invented my own context that seemed to fit in the paradigm.

Route registry is pretty much copy and paste == it works. I love the style of route definition too: /(?P<id>d+)

What can be improved

Using bitmask operators to map HTTP methods to callback isn’t terribly intuitive, although it’s easy enough to get going by copy and paste. I’ve never liked that part of the Rewrite API, and don’t think we should repeat it.

It would be nice to be able to modify the “data” field associated with a WP_Error entry. I’ve set up my models to return WP_Errors, but then I need to recreate that error in my controller to include the status code.

Because we have a variety of content models that are often mixed and mashed (e.g. a Post displayed with Author, Terms, and “Featured Image” Attachment), we should do embedded media really well. I think this is lacking in WP-API right now — you basically need to reinvent the wheel on each endpoint.

I’ve spent way too much time writing code to define and validate supplied arguments. I know this is something I like and Ryan hates, but it would be cool if we could nail field definition and validation for endpoints. This is something we did with H-API. It seems like we’re part of the way there by using Reflection for argument definition in our endpoint callbacks. Easy type validation is just the next step — maybe it could be introduced as an optional library.

On that note too, using Reflection against the defined method arguments to decide which request arguments are passed is too magical. It’s new to PHP and will be completely baffling to Joe Shmo WordPress developer.

Writing code and leading development teams is my full-time job. For local development, I use Vagrant and Salty WordPress. I was using VMWare Fusion for a while, but the filesystem caching issues drove me back to Virtualbox. I edit files with Sublime Text 3 running the Colbalt 2 theme. iTerm 2 (full-screen mode, duh) tames my terminal windows. Only on a rare occasion do I have to open Cyberduck to SFTP somewhere.

On the command line, my life is complete with ZSH, autojump, Git, hub, and WP-CLI. I consider every day I don’t have to use Subversion to be a good day. Most projects I’m on use Github with a as-simple-as-possible feature branch pull-request workflow.

Bartender wrangles my menu bar into submission. If I didn’t have it, my menu bar would be overrun with icons for:

• 1Password - The only sane way to use passwords these days.
• Quickcast - Shareable screencasts in just a few minutes.
• Glui - Annotated screengrabs. Far superior to Skitch.
• Alfred - Maybe obsoleted by Yosemite.
• RescueTime - Keeps track of which applications I’m using. I mostly use it for the weekly email summaries.
• Sidestep - Securely your internet traffic over any SSL connection.
• Flux - For the rare occasion I have the computer on past 7 pm.
• Clocks - Menu bar clock replacement for those who always be coordinating in multiple timezones.
• Caffeine - Jiggles your mouse when you need your screen to stay awake. Useful when giving presentations, etc.
• Crashplan - Affordable service for keeping everything backed up in the cloud.

Skype and Slack are open everyday. I’d like to say Slack is over-hyped, but they’ve done a really nice job. Sometimes I remember to open Linkinus to idle in various open source project IRC rooms.

How I run my business is really a post in itself. Harvest is indispensable — I use it for sending estimates, time tracking, and billing. Things is awesome for keeping track of what needs to be done and when. A long time Remember The Milk user, I love having a dedicated desktop application for task management. Mailplane is the best way to deal with email in 2014.

Oh, last but not least, I use a mid-2011 13 inch Macbook Air with a 256 GB SSD and 4 GB of RAM. It’s the best computer I’ve ever owned.

Options I’ve looked into over the last two hours:

1. Attach a USB hard drive to our ASUS N66U router to serve as NAS. Reportedly, this is possible. However, when I began my search, I came across this article from February 2014: “Dear Asus router user: You’ve been pwned, thanks to easily exploited flaw.” This doesn’t give me much confidence, particularly considering I’ve never upgraded our router’s firmware and have no desire to do so.
2. Buy a Time Capsule, connect a secondary USB hard drive, and put a common iPhoto library on it. However, this comes with a bunch of caveats. Namely: it doesn’t really work. Plus you really need to commit to a wired connection.
3. Chuck all of our media assets into one of those fancy file sharing services. Box appears to have the best deal: unlimited storage for $15/month. However, that’s on the Business plan with a 5 user minimum.
4. Use Dropbox or BitTorrent Sync to sync files between our computers. We’d get an additional layer of redundancy. Leah has 500 GB free and I have… 30 GB free (SSD).
5. Buy an iMac and use it as our shared family computer. We can use whatever we want, but we’d have to figure out where to put it in our small condo.
6. Or buy a Mac Mini, put it in the figurative closet (actually the bottom of the changing table, where our printer is), and VNC into it when want to manage photos. Might be on to something there.

P.S. Crashplan supports backing up a NAS drive as long as you can mount it. It’s $60/year for unlimited data. And Dropbox is $100/year for 100 GB. How does that work?

Although I didn’t finish my slides until this morning, I did a couple of things I’ll always be doing going forward:

1. Produce a list of a few bullet points I want to hit for each slide, in case I get off track. I put these in Apple Notes so I could easily reference from my phone when I got stuck.
2. Practice the presentation a couple times. This was really helpful to identify how I wanted to transition between each slide.

Post-work, pre-dinner bike ride around the airstrip.

Memo to self: always put the cover on the front. Because dirt and baby.

Short answer: with code! Because AdOps only wants to create a limited set of ad slots, and Google DFP slots can be used once per page, you’ll need to display the slot first, and reload it for each subsequent use.

The slots are added dynamically as the user scrolls. If a given slot has already been loaded once, then the next time we try to use it we actually pull the first instance over to our new slot, reload it, and add a placeholder for its old position so the page height doesn’t jump. We can use the same trick scrolling back up, simply replacing the placeholder with the refreshed ad.

Google’s documentation has a similar example that’s a good reference point for methods, etc. Pay attention to googletag.refresh( unit ); and googletag.pubads().refresh([unitInstance]); — unitInstance is what’s returned by googletag.defineSlot(), so you’ll need to store that somewhere for later reference.

I look forward to hearing about the straightforward approach I missed…

The way to Ísafjörður from Hellnar is a gnarly three hour gravel road. Before hitting town, you’ll drive through a long (~10 km) tunnel with a 60 km/h speed limit. After the tunnel, the speed limit goes back up to 90 km/h. And then, kilometers before you enter the city proper, it drops back down to 60 km/h. But I missed that sign (crying baby and all). Most of Iceland is 90 km/h unless you’re within a city’s limits.

We took a pit stop between the tunnel and town at Bonus to pick up groceries for the week. Within a couple of minutes out of the parking lot, a police car passed us, pulled a U-turn, and flashed its lights. Busted!

The police asked me to get in the back seat of the police car because they video record the interaction. They explained the 60 km/h speed limit and showed me their clocked speed, which I didn’t disagree with. I was going 82 km/h because I thought the speed limit was still 90 km/h. I explained I wanted to contest the ticket.

In the US, my understanding of the game is this: get a speeding ticket, contest it in front of a judge, get anywhere between 0-100% off. Typically it’s at least 50% off. And that’s if you formally get a ticket — if you have a cute baby in the back seat, the police will just let you off with a warning. I’d grade my argument a B-, worth 40% off.

In Iceland, contesting a speeding ticket is mostly unheard of, and confuses the police. First, you’ll have to go with them to the station. There you’ll need to explain for at least an hour why you’re wanting to submit an appeal. Once you get them to agree,  you’ll need to go back each morning to ask whether your appeal paperwork has been submitted yet. But don’t worry, it hasn’t.

I also learned:

• Foreigners have the same rights as Icelanders to an appeal process (Article 30 of Act On Foreigners No. 96 /2002).
• Your actual rights to an appeal process are pretty obtuse to understand (Section 7 of Administrative Procedure Act).
• The police say you can be detained in the country during your appeal, which I didn’t ever see in writing. This was largely their argument for why I should pay the fee in a prompt manner.
• Electronic speed limit signs, which show your current speed and flash if you’re over, are 1.5 million ISK (~$13k USD).
• Ísafjörður has one of the aforementioned signs on the lesser used road into town. I’d be curious as to why it’s there, and not on the main road.
• Iceland does have a legal process for requesting anonymized data from the government. I’d hypothesize speeding tickets during the summer months are a cash cow.

Unless you’re me, it’s probably easier for you to just pay the ticket via credit card while in the back seat of the police car. I wanted to get my money’s worth in the form of a better understanding of Iceland’s legal system.

And remember, if you don’t exercise your legal rights, you might find you no longer have them.

Enjoying the scene and a Swiss mocha after the hike from Hellnar to Arnarstapi and back. Bobo is quite the happy traveler.

We’re staying at Hotel Hellnar, near the end of the Snaelfellsnes Peninsula, for three nights before taking the ferry to Flatey and driving on to Ísafjörður. Our hiking is dependent on the weather. It was clear enough this morning to get one in, but started pouring as soon as we returned. This afternoon we decided to drive up to Stykkisholmur and check out the town. Tomorrow? Either hiking in Snaefellsjokull National Park, or watching movies in our room.

Classic “all’s well that ends well story.”

Last night, Bobo took, oh, about five hours to be put to sleep. For this reason and that, she just would not go down. And, to make matters worse, she knew she was tired — so she cried and cried and cried. Putting her in the Ergo finally calmed her down enough to feed and fall asleep.

Eleven hours later, you know “noon”, the Bachhuber family is waking up for the day. Leah is exhausted because Bobo slept in her arms all night, and I’m two hours late to pick up our rental car. I get that sorted, pick up a scone for Leah, and we’re eventually off for the day’s trip to the Blue Lagoon.

All of the reading Leah did before the trip seemed to imply kids would do just fine in the geothermal pool. I had assumed the waters were 80-90 degrees, and we would have a grand time as a family. As it turns out… the waters were 98-102 degrees, and the official recommendation is no kids under two.

YOVIO (You Only Visit Iceland Once)! It took some serious effort to convince Leah, but I snuck Bobo into the water on my shift. She loved it — and her skin is now as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

Old Reykjavik towards the harbor from the tower of Hallgrimskirkja church. Doing a bit of sightseeing after sleeping in until 10 am. Bobo took the flights over like a champ; for Leah, it was a bit more rough but last night was a good ketchup.

Dong, dong, dong… church bells in the tower strike one. Time to bounce Bobo back to sleep.

After we arrive Monday morning, we spend three nights in Reykjavik. Wednesday we plan to take a day trip to the Blue Lagoon. Apparently little bobos are encouraged — a water wing should fit nicely around her belly. From Reykjavik, we’ll take our rented car to Hellnar for three days of hiking. Then, to get to Ísafjörður where we’re spending the second week, we take a ferry that stops for the day on Flatey Island.

I’ll be offline the first week, and working a half week the second. Looking forward to the opportunity to relax, spend time with my family, and reflect.

Shot at the BCNI Philly after-party.

Beginning with CoPress, I got the taste of running a WordPress-only hosting company. Watching clients email Microsoft Word documents back and forth became the genesis of Edit Flow, which is now used by some of the largest news organizations in the world.

Moving on to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, I grew to realize the impact usable software can have on education, and was a valued voice for innovation within the institution.

At Automattic, I spent two years on the WordPress.com VIP team reviewing code, fixing nasty bugs, and training developers. I’ve had the honor to speak at many WordCamps, including WordCamp San Francisco. And, along the way, I made significant contributions to Co-Authors Plus and other plugins, and fell in love with WP-CLI.

With Human Made, I split my time between client services and product. I supported a half-dozen clients, most notably Vocativ, CFO.com, and News Corp, with backend and frontend development, leadership, and project management for their launches. I also led WP Remote, a JS application built on a WordPress-powered API, through two substantial feature releases.

Now, through Hand Built, I’m ready to help you solve your business problems. Let it be creating a custom workflow experience for your content team, reviewing an existing codebase for security and performance, or migrating years of archives into WordPress, I have expertise you can depend on.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Strongly influenced by Salt provisioning and installable as a WP-CLI package, Dictator now allows you to:

• Export WordPress’ configuration to a human-readable YAML state file.
• Commit the state file to version control to share between environments, or with another developer.
• Compare the state of WordPress to the declared state file, with a colorized diff.
• Impose a state file onto WordPress.

Dictator understands WordPress in terms of states. States are collections of regions. Each state file has the state declaration along with tracked configuration details for each region. Regions have a defined schema which produces the translation between the human-readable YAML file and how WordPress stores state in the database.

One key idea Dictator adopted from provisioning systems: environments are ephemeral. WordPress no longer doing what you want it to? You should be able to destroy it and provision a brand new version.

For 0.1, Dictator packages two states: network and site. The network state comprises regions for network settings, users, and sites. The site state comprises regions for site settings, users, and terms. Management of widgets, roles, and more is just waiting for a pull request.

Think downloading the entirety of a production database is a messy way to get just a few configuration details? Me too — and with Dictator I can provision full WordPress environments without the bad assumptions that come with using production data.

Ever had a site launch that required a frantic amount of widget configuration right after changing DNS? More than I can remember — and I’m automating myself out of the problem.

Think non-posts data portability would be neat? So do I — and I built a tool for it that I’m very excited to share with you: Dictator. Try it out with wp dictator export site site-state.yml

After 41 weeks and one day in the making (and 16 hours of labor), our daughter Ava Lucille Bachhuber finally joined Leah and I on Monday at 4:01 pm. She’s beautiful, happy, healthy, and such a cute darling.

Aside from what you’d expect — long nights, taking on the doula responsibility to support Leah and Ava — I’ve had two pleasant surprises so far:

1. Home births are underrated, magical experiences for the birth partner. I consider myself very fortunate to have helped support Leah every step of the way, and to have gotten skin time with Ava just after her.
2. My sense of responsibility has increased a hundredfold. It’s amazing how your priorities can shift in a heartbeat.

Looking forward to many more pleasant surprises on this journey.

Also in this release:

• Updated Spanish translation, courtesy of sergiomajluf.
• Now matches core behavior when displaying author archive on multisite: user of the blog, or previously published author on the blog.
• Breaking change: “Create Profile” link is no longer shown by default on the Manage Users screen. Instead, it can be enabled with the coauthors_show_create_profile_user_link filter.
• Guest authors work properly with Jetpack Open Graph tags. Props hibernation.
• Guest author profile editor now supports a few different fields. Props alpha1.
• New coauthors_count_published_post_types filter for specifying the post type(s) used when calculating the user’s number of published posts.
• Bug fix: Ensure post_author is set to one of the co-authors assigned to a post.
• Bug fix: Filter author feed link for guest authors on the author page. Props hibernation.
• Packages a composer.json file for those using Composer.
• Beginnings of unit test coverage for core features. Increased minimum required WordPress version to 3.7 because WordPress.org unit testing framework doesn’t work reliabilty below that.

Please leave feedback, bug reports, and praise in the WordPress.org forums. You can also get involved with development on Github.

And I’ve been incredibly impressed. The machine is fast (although I guess I’m jinxing myself now), the control panel is just what I want it to be, and the price make me feel like I’m committing a robbery.

For anyone that wants to take a peek at what I’ve done, the repo is in Github. It was intended to be a one-day project, but I ran into some domain-mapping hell. As it turns out, core doesn’t fully support domain mapping as I thought it did.

Lastly, I provisioned my new machine using masterless Salty WordPress (work in progress). Hoping to align incentives such that Salty WordPress continues to be the best way to provision local and production WordPress machines.

As some of you may be aware of, Digital First Media is the second-largest newspaper chain in the US. Under leadership from the likes of John Paton, Jim Brady, Steve Buttry, and others, DFM is investing heavily in digital, to the tune of $100 million annually over the next three years. Part of this investment is their “Project Unbolt”, and part is other, yet to be announced news products and infrastructure. WordPress will be a key component of the technology stack — and DFM’s Thunderdome team is the place where many experiments are happening.

Five and half years ago (wow how time flies), I wrote “One case against College Publisher” in which I outlined the importance of open source in publishing. Since then, I’ve worked in news largely from the vendor perspective — none of the newsroom opportunities I explored were the right fit. With Digital First Media, I feel like I’ve gotten my big chance at the big leagues. I look forward to helping DFM implement WordPress in a variety of contexts, as well as increasing my contributions to WordPress core, Edit Flow, WP-CLI, and other projects. Open source has a tremendous opportunity to impact news, and the news industry has a tremendous opportunity to contribute to open source.

Check out the announcement on Inside Thunderdome. If you want to join the fun, we’re hiring a frontend developer for my team.

Ultimately, the point I wanted to get across is two-fold:

• Many applications you could think of building are easily doable with WordPress.
• WordPress-based products are even more interesting when you have a few, and durable components to share between them.

After the talk, I asked Zack for his feedback:

• Went well: introduction via Freshbooks example really set the stage for what we were talking about. Avoided misunderstanding / different opinions of what a web application was.
• Next time: Challenge people more. Explanation of how HM built WP Remote was a bit surface level. Could’ve gone deeper into the architecture as a frame of reference for people when they run into it.

Resources

All of the references I mentioned in the slides are available at the following links.

WP Remote components:

• Job Agency - Asynchronous jobs system for WordPress, built on WP-CLI.
• HM Rewrite - Wrapper for the WP Rewrite API.
• h-api - Simple, descriptive API pattern. Needs work for public consumption.

Object cache drop-ins:

• wp-redis from Alley Interactive
• WordPress Memcached Backend by Zack Tollman (uses PECL Memcached)
• Memcached Object Cache by Ryan Boren (uses PECL Memcache)

Future of WordPress:

• WP-API - JSON API for WordPress
• #14513 Time for a wp_post_relationships table?
• #20564 Framework for storing revisions of Post Meta
• #22316 Plugin Dependencies (Yet Another Plugin Dependencies Ticket)

Apparently this dilemma resonates with developers:

• Rarst: “sounds better in theory than works in practice, from my limited experience”
• Boone: “Generally a good idea, as long as the client’s needs aren’t so wacky as to make the feature awkward for general release. You might also include something in the agreement about post-contract support of the feature. Transition from ‘I’m paying you to implement my wishes’ to ‘I’m a regular user making feature requests’ is the tricky point”
• Eric: “If you properly vet these specific features (as opposed to blindly accepting cash) I think it’s a good idea. Biggest drawback is when the sponsorship dries up and you still have to support said feature in the plugin.”
• Brad: “great idea, not only features but full plugins. Easy to sell them on it knowing you’ll keep it up-to-date with current WP”
• Brady: “I’d say it’s a great route if the feature makes sense for general use, otherwise an extension/add-on might be better.”
• David: “good idea, as long as client understands the difference between customization and configuration. Oh, and proper contracts.”
• Nick: “As long as they understand they don’t own that feature and you may need to implement it in a more general way, it can work. One approach is to make it an addon and add the necessary hooks in core plugin. Allows you to EOL the feature if needed.”
• George: “don’t see anything bad in developing add-ons for side income, plus you might never developed for your use.”
• Jake: “as others said, it’s all about good expectations upfront, and not compromising the rest of the plugin’s audience”
• Travis: “Personally, I think it is a win-win, but it heavily depends on the “strings attached” mentality of the sponsor.”
• Ryan: “I’ve done that many times before and have encouraged it. I usually gave a big discount for open source stuff. I used to provide two prices, one for open source, one for closed source. Everyone chose the cheapest option.”

My takeaways:

• Make sure you’re explicit about the business relationship upfront (including support scope), probably in contract. If you aren’t, it can get complicated.
• If it fits within the scope / roadmap of the plugin, it can be a nice way to bootstrap open source development. Otherwise, it probably makes sense as an add-on.
• Pay attention to what users want as add-ons, as you can potentially turn those into premium plugins.

Joe will be in Portland next week for hacking and general mischief. If we manage to bang out the product idea I’ve had forever, it’s going to be something I’m very excited to show the world.

Today: Hiked Dog Mountain with Spittle. Gorge-ous day in the Gorge, but bitterly cold. Saw a few other brave souls.

Now: Just about the perfect time for a hot bath.

The key idea is to bring together a bunch of agencies that build on top of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and whatever other frameworks. Personally, here’s what I’d like to get out of it:

• Learn how others are turning their agencies from guns for hire to experts in developing particular types of projects. For instance, with Human Made I would love to see more inbounds that refer to the product work we’ve done (e.g. Happytables and WP Remote) and want to hire us for similar. Rather than just doing work with a particular type of tool because you’re good at it, we be doing more work that we have proven ourselves leaders of.
• Hear horror stories of situations other agencies the gotten themselves into, and want for no one else to ever repeat.
• See the cool projects other agencies have been building but can’t publicly discuss. I want to be inspired.

Ideally, it would be a two or three day retreat-like event in some great location. Solid presentations, but lots of time for networking. I’m a fan of conferences as a model for continuing education largely because many of us are making this up as we go along, and they’re high-bandwidth opportunities for sharing knowledge.

Let me know if you know of any events like this, or are up for planning it yourself. I’d really love to see this conference happen.

Epic Summer

The most notable events of the year took place between the months of May and September.

Sunday, May 26th - Proposed to Leah at the Spray Rodeo. After a couple of months procrastinating / waiting for the right opportunity, I went for it. Dropping the question in front of hundreds of people was the easy part. Summoning the courage to ask permission from her dad was much more difficult. Best decision I’ve ever made.

Monday, July 29th - My 26th birthday, aka the day we learned Leah was pregnant. I remember the moment vividly — she was at home, I was at work, and she called me on Skype video to share the news. My initial reaction was excitement, and I’ve been excited ever since. We weren’t quite ready to share the news with my parents that evening, but my sister Madeline guessed something was up when Leah uncharacteristically declined to try her cocktail.

Sunday, September 1st - Leah and I get married at the beach, in front of Haystack Rock and almost 200 family and friends. Oregon lived up to its promise with beautiful weather. We had a perfect weekend.

Professionally Speaking

2013 was great for hitting my stride as a web developer focusing on media and technology. I started out the year continuing my gig with Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP team. In addition to the day to day of competing with Mo for most closed Zendesk tickets, I continued work on Edit Flow, Co-Authors Plus, Ad Code Manager, and a variety of other plugins.

I also started contributing more regularly to WP-CLI:

Getting to be involved in the project is something I’m both honored by and proud of. WP-CLI has been an invaluable asset to the work I do — I use it in some capacity on a daily basis. Having my code critiqued by scribu has really pushed me as a developer too. His feedback is always apropos, but it’s fun to occasionally prove him otherwise. One of these days, the package manager will finally land…

At the end of April, I left Automattic to join Human Made, a leading WordPress agency that splits its time between clients and product. It was a great transition for me. The team is a pleasure to work with, I get to apply my creativity every day, and the gig has all of the perks of a distributed company.

Since the switch, I’ve likely spent the most amount of time working on Vocativ and WP Remote. The former has been a neat opportunity to me because I’ve been able to build many “future of journalism” ideas I’ve had in the past. Although I’m technically not in the newsroom, it’s the closest I’ve ever been and I get to interface with editorial staff on a regular basis. They’ve hired a number of forward-thinking journalists too. Two things we’ve built of note: Template Manager, essentially Zoninator on steroids, and Poster Images, aka Photoshop in the browser with Imagick doing the heavy lifting. They use both to maintain a highly-visual homepage, with more user-facing features to come.

WP Remote has also been a great opportunity to flex my creative muscles. Just a month after starting with Human Made, I helped lead the charge on getting its first paid feature out the door: Automatic Backups. The only problem: our async jobs system was dead on launch. Joe and I then spent the next 24 hours building Job Agency, a simple, durable jobs system for WordPress (powered by WP-CLI, of course). In October, we launched WP Remote Premium with a few more features, and WP Remote has seen steady revenue growth since.

I really look forward to helping shape Human Made to be a company I want to work with for years to come.

Jet-setting

For the last few years, I’ve been pretty fortunate to have jobs and a work/life balance that support one of my passions: traveling.

According to TripIt, here’s the tally for 2013:

• 24 trips over 139 days.
• 99,228 miles flown.
• Visited 33 cities in 8 countries.

Broken down, it looks like:

• January - Vegas for Blogworld, Tahoe for skiing, San Francisco for the AAN Digital conference.
• February - Vegas for the VIP team meetup, New Zealand for Webstock, Utah for skiing, Kentucky for NICAR.
• March - Seattle for some Edit Flow hacking, Hawaii for a week of rest and relaxation.
• April - No travel (except the beach)!
• May - San Francisco to meet Tom and Joe for the first time.
• June - Seattle for WC SEA, NYC to kick things off with Vocativ, Japan for a bit of adventure, Wisconsin for a family memorial.
• July - Lake District in the UK for Human Made meetup, Meadow family cruise to Alaska, San Francisco for Vocativ meetup.
• August - No travel (except the beach and Central Oregon)!
• September - Honeymoon number one to Sunriver, NYC for Vocativ, Amsterdam to launch WP Remote Premium and attend WordCamp Europe.
• October - Victoria to visit Leah’s grandparents.
• November - San Francisco for GigaOm Roadmap.
• December - NYC for Vocativ, Paris for honeymoon number two, and Boston and NY for cousin Steve’s wedding.

With a baby on the way it will be tough to beat those numbers next year but I’ll try my best!

Here’s the problem I want to solve: iPhoto, but in the cloud. The digital version of the photo boxes my parents have under their window seat with decades of history.

As someone who spent a few years trying to make it as a photographer, I’ve got a terabyte or two of photos on old hard drives that I hope haven’t failed yet. I want to put those photos in some place more permanent than what I’ve got. Deep archive is less desirable of an option because I have to remember to check every so often, they’re more difficult to access when I want to, etc.

As someone who’s recently married with a kid on the way, I want to collect all of our digital media in one place. In the cloud means it’s not tied to the ephemeral nature of personal machines, and that both Leah and I can manage it (she tends to do more photo stuff now anyways).

So… the fun part. If I had a week to slap this together, here’s how I’d build it:

• WordPress
• … but JS app built on top of an API
• Flat usage fee. You provide your own S3 bucket to start, with more storage options down the line.
• Drag and drop upload.
• Organize photos in galleries, edit IPTC metadata, tag faces.
• Image crop and rotation.
• Multi-user access on the account-level, but also gallery-level so family / friends could contribute.
• Emphasize data portability above all.

Other ideas that could come later:

• One-click archive a gallery to Amazon Glacier if you don’t plan to use it for a while.
• Mail in your DVDs if you don’t want to cap out your internet connection forever.
• Advanced image editing with revision history.
• Keeps track of how your photos are being used across the web (e.g. Facebook version vs Flickr one)
• Auto-import from Facebook / Instagram / iPhone.
• Optional fixed-price catastrophic backup service.
• Bells & whistles.

Later: Worth mentioning that Human Made is hiring full time frontend / backend product devs if you’re into this sort of thing.

Here’s hoping our daughter gets Leah’s genes!

I don’t normally like photos of myself, but this is pretty awesome.

Spent a long time thinking about my role in the WordPress community too. Wrote a pretty angsty post this morning that didn’t end up now I wanted it to. Still not sure how to solve the problems I see.

• Automatic backups to WP Remote, or Dropbox or your own S3 account.
• Daily email summaries of what’s been happening on your sites.
• Ability to install, activate, deactivate, and delete themes and plugins.
• Automatic core, theme, and plugin updates.
• History now logs important actions happening within WordPress, including when a theme is switched, an administrator logs in, etc.

What I’m most excited about, and what WP Tavern nailed in their coverage, is that the launch of Premium also marks the formal announcement of the WP Remote API. Our entire JavaScript web application is built upon the same API that’s available to the public. For our users, this means the sky is the limit in how they integrate WP Remote into their workflow. For Human Made, the API is a rock solid foundation for us to continue to build WP Remote experiences with. It also means we can develop the API independently of the user-facing application.

The API

Think of the WP Remote API as a single hub for managing all of your remote sites. Our eventual goal is to offer an endpoint for manipulating each object inside of WordPress. Right now, we offer Plugin, Theme, User, and Option.

In the process of launching Premium, we did a complete rewrite of the API codebase. Our rewrite offered a two-fold advantage: adding a new endpoint is vastly simplified, and our API docs are automatically generated through Reflection.

As an example, read through the site/option endpoint:

[sourcecode language=“php”] <?php namespace WPRemoteAPI; /** * Manage a Site’s options */ class Site_Option_Endpoint extends Site_Endpoint {

protected $pattern = ‘site/{SITE_ID}/option/{OPTION_NAME}’; protected $query = ‘site_id=$matches[1]&option_name=$matches[2]’; protected $arguments = array( ‘option_value’ => array( ‘required’ => true, ‘sanitize_callback’ => false, ‘methods’ => array( ‘POST’ ) ), ); protected $methods = array( ‘GET’, ‘POST’, ‘DELETE’ ); protected $authenticated = true; protected $premium = true;

protected function get() {

$result = $this->site->options->get_option( $this->option_name );

if ( is_wp_error( $result ) ) $this->send_error( $result->get_error_message(), 500 );

$this->send_response( $result );

}

protected function post( $args ) {

$result = $this->site->options->update_option( $this->option_name, $args[‘option_value’] );

if ( is_wp_error( $result ) ) $this->send_error( $result->get_error_message(), 500 );

$log_args = array( ’type’ => ‘option’, ‘action’ => ‘update’, ‘option_name’ => $this->option_name, ‘option_value’ => $args[‘option_value’] ); $this->site->log->add_item( $log_args );

}

protected function delete() {

$result = $this->site->options->delete_option( $this->option_name );

if ( is_wp_error( $result ) ) $this->send_error( $result->get_error_message(), 500 );

$log_args = array( ’type’ => ‘option’, ‘action’ => ‘delete’, ‘option_name’ => $this->option_name ); $this->site->log->add_item( $log_args );

}

protected function validate_query_vars( $query_vars ) {

$query_vars = parent::validate_query_vars( $query_vars );

if ( empty( $query_vars[‘option_name’] ) ) $this->send_error( ‘Invalid option.’, 404 );

$this->option_name = sanitize_text_field( $query_vars[‘option_name’] ); }

}

WPRemote_API()->add_endpoint( new Site_Option_Endpoint ); [/sourcecode]

At the top of the class, we define:

• Endpoint pattern. This is then translated into regex, and registered with WordPress’ Rewrite API using HM Rewrite.
• Query args, or how the pattern should be translated into usable data. Each endpoint class has access to a validate_query_vars() method which validates and sanitizes the passed arguments. For this endpoint, you can see how it first calls its parent’s validator, and then validates on its own.
• Supported arguments. Additional arguments can be defined method by method. Each argument can have a few attributes: whether or not it’s required, sanitization callback, which methods use the argument, and, not shown here, a default value. The arguments are automagically processed by the base endpoint class, and passed into the method’s callback.
• Supported methods, and whether or not the endpoint requires authentication or a Premium account. Fairly self-explanatory, I hope.

These class attributes communicate the endpoint’s qualities in a structured way. In addition to providing us a highly-usable abstraction of code, they also form the basis of our documentation. Through PHPdoc and Reflection, we can provide human-readable documentation at the endpoint-level and the method-level.

Notice we’ve yet to implement argument descriptions and mock endpoint responses. Human Made is hiring a full-time PHP product developer — come help us sort it out!

Launch Process

WP Remote Premium is the second significant WP Remote launch process I’ve participated in. The first was Automatic Backups in June. At the end of the first, we did a post-mortem to identify what went well, and what we’d like to improve upon. Fortunately, we don’t seem to be repeating any past mistakes.

With this launch, here are a few pieces I think we did well:

Met our launch date. The Friday before WordCamp Europe had been set for a couple of months. A few days before, we set an announcement time of 9 am GMT. We formally announced the product at 9:45 am GMT on Friday. Booyah, #shipping.

https://twitter.com/matth_eu/status/386067788944523264

Focused on what needed to be done, vs. what we wanted to do. Every product launch is death by a thousand decisions of bugs to fix, features to add, and tweaks to make. Making decisions from the perspective of what needs to be done forced a clarity to our efforts. In the last 24 hours before launch, we worked against a “Premium Launch Blockers” milestone. When that cleared, we launched.

Brought everyone together for the final push. As much as I love working distributed, there’s nothing like being in physical proximity to build excitement for shipping. Collaboration is higher bandwidth, and it’s much easier to triage, reallocate, etc.

Next time we launch a substantial addition to a product, here are a couple pieces I’d like us to do better:

Longer beta test period. Premium was open for beta testers three days before launch. The functionality for Premium was largely done, however the UI wasn’t in place. There haven’t been any huge bugs uncovered, but beta periods are always nice for fit and finish. Ideally, any large release should be in beta for a couple of weeks.

Spend more time on marketing. Although it wasn’t as rushed as Automatic Backups, I’d mark our marketing strategy as “bare minimum plus one.” We didn’t send any materials to publications until a day prior, largely because the UI was still in flux, and owe thanks to Post Status and WP Tavern for the quick turnaround. On our end, we banged through documentation, an announcement post, and some tweets. In the future, we should be working on marketing for a couple or few weeks.

Ultimately, the launch of WP Remote Premium met or exceeded many of my goals. Renewed focus on offering all of our functionality through a public API is what sets us apart from the alternatives, and will make WP Remote a durable product for the long-term. I’m excited to see what people come up with.

We’d love for you to break it try it out. The free endpoints allow you to update core, themes, and plugins, download an archive of the entire site, and access a log of the actions you’ve performed on the site. Our Premium version lets you install, activate, deactivate and delete themes and plugins, and enable automatic backups, with more to come.

Feel free to write scripts that use the API, or build a new interface on top of it (our application is built entirely on the API). We’ve also created WP Remote CLI for you, a WP-CLI command to access WP Remote. Our goal is feature parity with WP-CLI, plus more. My favorite command right now: wp --site-id=31 remote-site download

Because Premium isn’t launched yet, shoot us an email and we’d be happy to enable Premium endpoints for your site.

Oh yeah — Human Made is hiring for a product-focused frontend developer. If you know someone who might fit the bill, please send them our way. Bonus points if they pitch us with something they’ve built on the API.

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With any luck, these should hold me out a few more weeks…

For the full story on Leah’s pregnancy, check out her write-up. We learned just over a month ago — on my birthday, in fact. Having discussed baby names for the past six months, I was mentally prepared and my initial reaction was excitement. Leah took a week or so to get used to the fact we’d be having a kid in March 2014 instead of March 2019. Once she did, we shared the news with the world.

On Sunday, Leah and I got hitched in front of Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach. It was, sincerely, the best day of my life. Not only did I get to tie the knot with my best friend, but the weather was beyond believable. Perfect day for a beach wedding. We had over 180 people attend the ceremony and reception. I’m truly humbled by those who took the time to celebrate with us, particularly those who traveled across the country and across the world.

Originally we had plans for a two-week honeymoon to Turkey and Greece. Because of the pregnancy, we’re instead headed to Sunriver for several days. We haven’t left yet though! Thanks to the state of healthcare insurance in the US, today we discovered Leah is denied any new coverage because pregnancy is a pre-existing condition. Her existing coverage ends September 19th. Fortunately, Oregon has the Oregon Medical Insurance Pool to pick up where the private sector drops off. Ironically, Regence, who provides my insurance and said they would deny her, is the provider of OMIP.

My genuine wish is for the “startup” world to take solving real problems more seriously. Josh Kushner’s Oscar sounds neat.

Before, training to me was running as far as I could, as fast as I could. In my infamous first attempt at a marathon, I’d string together an eight miler, a fourteen miler, a nine miler and do a six miles on my off day. Needless to say, it was too much — my body fell apart three weeks before the marathon.

Now, because I’m training for endurance, all I need to do is keep my heart rate below 155. I don’t have to come out of every run exhausted, needing a day of recovery. Instead, I feel invigorated.

I didn’t bonk on this one, but I did feel pretty beat at the end of it. And today definitely wouldn’t have been a good day for forty.

The theory is that it was a combination of dehydration and the wrong heart rate for me. Planning to pick up a Garmin GPS + heart rate monitor watch — we’ll see how slow running at 145 bpm is like.

One step back to the problem I’m trying to solve. More and more, I enjoy writing in Markdown with iA Writer. “Publishing” whatever document I’ve written generally involves hitting the Preview button in iA Writer, and then copy and pasting text into WordPress. Yes, the same workflow I’ve been preaching against for years.

I wish I could have a Git checkout of content in WordPress, make edits locally using my editor of choosing, commit, and push back to master. I’m aware of Jeykll and the other hipster “content management systems”, however I’m still an old-school content in a database kind of guy.

Always looking for an excuse to travel, Leah and I hit Tokyo, the Kiso Valley, and Osaka June 14th through 24th. It was Leah’s third time to Japan and my first. Needless to say, everything that was wild to me was no big deal to her.

Our itinerary looked like this (Leah did a great job blogging the first part of the week):

• Friday: Depart Portland Friday afternoon, arrive Tokyo in the future.
• Sunday: Explore Tokyo with Seiga and drink iced coffee from vending machines. Skytree was my favorite sight.
• Monday: Check out the Tsukiji Fish Market, eat a bowl of ramen, then take Shinkansen to Nagoya and Kiso Valley to experience the ryokan.
• Tuesday: Hike from Tsumago to Magome (16 km or so). More eating.
• Wednesday: Take Shinkansen to Osaka, where we stayed with Leah’s friend Nathan for the rest of the trip. Indian food for dinner.
• Thursday: Explore Kyoto. Experience a legit tea ceremony. Make nachos with homemade tortilla chips from homemade tortillas.
• Friday: Hang out in Osaka part one. Running in the morning along the waterfront. Read in a coffee shop. Wander around all night with a friendly drunk guy.
• Saturday: Hang out in Osaka part two. Recover from our hangovers. Attempt to buy souvenirs, but fail because neither Leah or I like shopping.
• Sunday: Explore Nara. Fight deer. Hike to the top of a hill. Shinkansen back to Tokyo, and fly home.

As a kid, I remember distinctly the effects of jet lag. One trip in particular had me fall asleep on a bench along the Champs-Élysées at four in the afternoon. My family waited for me to wake back up, patiently munching on baguettes. Another had me tour around zombie-like for 42 hours because I simply couldn’t fall asleep.

The same kid who couldn’t sleep on planes for the life of him is now out in a heartbeat. Mitigating jet lag is a combination of: sleep at the right time, plenty of water and small meals, and caffeine, but not too much.

Coming back from Italy last June, I fought jet lag by running around the Coliseum late at night. I was sufficiently tired by my 6 am flight that I slept the entire way home. Given how timezones work, I landed in Portland mid-morning, drank my Earl Grey, worked a few hours, drove to Sunriver, and was convinced to do a half-marathon the next day.

Last week plus change, Leah and I flew to Tokyo. For me, it was the day following a return from New York — I had a total of 11 timezones to deal with. Our flight out was at 8 pm local and arrived 10 pm local. I slept six hours on the plane, spent a couple hours in transit to our hostel, and then slept four more hours. On our first day in Japan, we managed a full day of sightseeing.

Today, I’m back in Portland, rocking to Kyary Kyary Pamyu, and, having been up since 2 am, keeping my fingers crossed that my theory holds.

It’s working out awesomely. Earlier this week, we announced our primary lineup of speakers. I suppose it’s a given because I’m the speaker coordinator, but I’d love to attend every one. They all tie into our theme of “permanence”, yet stand strongly in their own right.

And, as if those sessions weren’t enough, we’ve invited Brewster Kahle, of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, to give a keynote. We also have one more keynote to announce.

When we began planning this year’s WordCamp, I knew I wanted us to push hard to raise the bar. There are enough WordCamps happening every month, and subsequently talks making it to WordPress.tv, that the status quo shouldn’t be a generic, third time old presentation. Our idea: if we mandate video applications, and only one per person, it would encourage potential speakers to consider their pitch thoroughly. Furthermore, videos would enable us to better assess the person’s stage presence and ability to communicate concisely, both of which are important for inspiring an audience.

It’s safe to say we didn’t know if the idea would work until the day of the deadline. Up until the last 12 hours, the outcome was unknown and, frankly, a little nerve-wracking. In total, we received ~25 applications; 90% were submitted on the last day. It paid off though. Most of the applications were solid, obvious examples of much consideration, and the video format was a tremendous help for screening.

Go out on a limb every once in a while, take a risk, and see how it plays out.

On the road to Rockaway for BeachPress, aka the beach and WordPress. Alex says it’s too rainy for the Viper, so we’re taking the Mustang instead.

On Sunday, May 26th, I asked Leah to marry me. She said yes — in front of her family and hundreds at the Spray Rodeo. Her father, Ned, caught the moment in the video above.

I’d been waiting for the right opportunity for a few months, spending my time agonizing on which ring to buy and where to pop the question. At the start of our relationship, Leah played an important role in producing my mom’s 30th wedding anniversary gift to my dad. I thought I might take her down to the beach, have a couple friends spell out the marriage proposal in driftwood, and then pop the question. The fates decided I needed to propose in a better way.

Spray it was. Attending the two-day Spray Rodeo, and camping in Shelton-Wayside, is a long-standing Olson family tradition. Leah has been every year since she was six — yes, this year was her twentieth year. Considering she’s mentioned multiple times Spray is her “favorite time of the year,” I knew it was my best chance to get her to say yes.

Sunday morning started out with dismal weather. It rained so hard we stayed in the tent until 9 am. The rain let up, a little sun poked out, and I set about chilling my nerves by chopping wood.

Proposing to Leah posed two challenges: asking for permission from her father, and sweet-talking the rodeo committee into letting me into the arena. The first was much more intimidating to me. When the clouds started to clear, and with my window of opportunity growing smaller, I knew I needed to man up. I went to chat with Ned.

“Hey Ned, can you take a walk to the truck with me?” I ask. Ned gave me a weird look, reached into his pocket, and handed me his keys. “Actually, I’d like to walk with you to have a chat,” I clarified. Ned gave me a weirder look and reluctantly said “ok….”

I pitched my request. My fears didn’t manifest themselves. Ned gave his blessing, wrapped me in a big bear hug, and proceeded to tell me that even if he said no, he’d still expect me to ask Leah. First hurdle cleared.

Convincing the powers that be to let me hijack the rodeo late on day two was dependent on a great deal of luck. Fortunately, I had luck to cash in. I managed to get the name of Joann Griffith, long-time organizer, as the person who could give me the go-ahead. After a quick search, and help from a couple friendly souls, I found her in Frank’s Pub.

I pitched my request. “Well, I always love a good love story,” Joann responded. Boom, two for two. Time for the final step: walking out into the arena, and taking the mic from the announcer…

Here’s what we did:

• Jeremy Ross submitted a section of code he had been working on, along with instructions on what he wanted feedback on.
• On Saturday, I reviewed the code. I committed it in one commit to a branch in a private Github repo. On the changeset, I did a line-by-line read-through, commenting as I went. To wrap the review up, I created a pull request explaining how I did the review, what I looked for, and how to interpret my feedback.
• Saturday night, I prepared a reveal.js presentation with an introduction to code review and the contents of what I found in my review. reveal.js is a super slick tool for preparing a HTML/CSS/JS presentation out of content in Markdown.
• Jeremy read and considered my review, then updated the presentation with his feedback.
• I did most of the presentation discussion facilitation, and Jeremy talked through how he received my feedback.

reveal.js doesn’t produce great static slide output, and I used its Markdown feature which requires Grunt to serve, so the bulk of what we covered will forever live on in the outline that follows.

What is code review vs. a code audit?

Code review is a process for testing, revising, and confirming code before pushing to production.

Code audit is a similar process, but happens after the push to production.

Why is code review useful over code audit?

There are a number of reasons, primarily…

• Promotes small, frequent improvements over large changesets. With the former, it’s easier for the reviewer to confirm the code change matches the expected behavior change.
• Easier to change direction on the architecture of the code before pushing live than after pushing live.
• Developers have greater incentive to fix problems before they’ve pushed to production, than after.

How do you do code review well?

Well, everyone has their opinions. Here are some:

• Establish guidelines for the review: what’s being reviewed, what the reviewer is looking for, and how feedback will be provided.
• Reviewee should include details on how to test anything that needs to be tested.
• Reviewer should over communicate, prioritize feedback, and be constructive, not adversarial.
• Code review is a conversation. Timeliness, courtesy, and clarity all matter.

How Daniel reviewed Jeremy’s code

1. Straight read through of the code, line-by-line.
2. Focus on security, coding standards, and best practices.
3. Hashtagged my feedback: #needsfix, #wouldbenice, #optional, #question
4. Over-communicated, adding examples and links as much as possible. Some of my comments, as you’ll see, are better than others.
5. Didn’t QA code against what it’s supposed to do, or give much thought to how you could restructure it.

Issues Daniel found in the code

Security

Validate / sanitize data in input.

Escape data on output.

Put secrets in a config file.

Best practices

Prefix everything to avoid collisions in global scope.

Remove or comment on dead code.

Considerations

Sessions don’t work well in multi-server environments.

Use WP_Http API for remote requests.

Questions help the developer justify their decisions.

Last December, I reached out to Susan Gage, managing editor for digital at The Oregonian, about hosting a hackathon. We had initial conversations about the idea, pulled in Lauren and Ivar, and started planning. Then, in February, I began hearing a bunch about Sisi, Tom, and Code With Me. I got the full download on how Code With Me works from Sisi at NICAR. After a brief discussion with Lauren and Ivar, it became obvious bringing Code With Me to Portland was a much better idea than a hackathon. So we set about convincing Sisi and Tom it was worth their time.

What worked well:

• Tom and Sisi have spent a lot of time considering their approach and pulling resources together. All of their effort showed.
• All of the exercises were available online during and after the presentations. Useful for students to review.
• Each student had a printed reference sheet with many of the topics we covered.
• The paper coding exercise was amazing. It was a hands-on, physical application of very digital knowledge, and also promoted discussion between students.
• Twenty mentors donated their weekends. Wonderful support from the community.
• The Oregonian stepped up with the location, Knight-Mozilla Open News covered much of the costs, and Automattic generously covered the mentor thank you dinner.

What should be added next time:

• Refresher for mentors on teaching strategies. Even though we only had two students to work with, it was still challenging to switch into teacher mode, adapt to different learning styles, etc.
• Assistance with scoping student projects.
• Provide a set of tools/resources (e.g. jQuery plugins, TableTop.js for transforming a Google Spreadsheet, etc.) mentors can refer to when helping students build their projects.

Some logistical notes:

• Saturday lunch: Cultured Caveman is a delicious food choice, but one needs to be a little more deliberate about what you need. We were short on some vegetarian options.
• Mentor dinner: The Picnic House was the only place, of the half dozen I called, I could find to accommodate a party of twenty on Saturday night. Good deal for the associated costs. Service was a little slow / awkward.
• Sunday lunch: Cha Cha Cha has the catering thing nailed. Enough food and options for everyone’s dietary needs.

After the weekend, here are the open questions I’m thinking about:

• How can we better enable educators to teach these skills to their students?
• Do students have the opportunity to apply their new knowledge? How do their skills progress over time?
• For those of us who want to continue contributing as mentors, where do we go next? What’s the most valuable use of our volunteering time?

• Authors have a strong incentive to craft small, well-formed changes that will be readily understood, to explain them adequately, and to provide appropriate test plans, test coverage and context.
• Reviewers have a real opportunity to make significant suggestions about architecture or approach in review. These suggestions are less attractive to adopt from audit, and may be much more difficult to adopt if significant time has passed between push and audit.
• Authors have a strong incentive to fix problems and respond to feedback received during review, because it blocks them. Authors have a much weaker incentive to address problems raised during audit.
• Authors can ask reviewers to apply and verify fixes before they are pushed.
• Authors can easily pursue feedback early, and get course corrections on approach or direction.
• Reviewers are better prepared to support a given change once it is in production, having already had a chance to become familiar with and reason through the code.
• Reviewers are able to catch problems which automated tests may have difficulty detecting. For example, human reviewers are able to reason about performance problems that tests can easily miss because they run on small datasets and stub out service calls.
• Communicating about changes before they happen generally leads to better preparation for their effects.

These plugins include:

• Edit Flow
• Co-Authors Plus
• Ad Code Manager
• P2 Resolved Posts
• Document Feedback
• Rewrite Rules Inspector
• Custom JavaScript Editor

Sometimes what appears to be a curse is actually a blessing in disguise. Human Made has pretty neat products in the works that I’m enjoying applying my creative energy towards. Stay tuned for that. And, on the open source side of things, I’ll have more time to contribute to wp-cli.

To everyone who’s used one of the above: it’s been a pleasure working with you. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to do so again in the future.

Directions

Preheat oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a large bowl, combine nuts, seeds and coconut flakes. Stir until well combined. In a small bowl or 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup, mix coconut oil, honey, vanilla extract, cinnamon and nutmeg, until well blended. Pour oil and honey mixture over nuts and seeds and stir with a large spoon or your hands until everything is well coated.

Spread mixture out evenly on a jellyroll pan (cookie sheet with sides) and bake at 275 for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes. Remove from oven and stir in dried fruit. Let cool completely and store in an airtight jar.

Ingredients

• 1 cup raw cashews, chopped 
• 1 cup raw walnuts, chopped
• 2 cups sliced almonds
• 1 cup raw pumpkin seeds
• ½ cup raw sunflower seeds
• 2 cups unsweetened coconut flakes
• ½ cup melted coconut oil
• ½ cup honey (or ¼ cup honey and ¼ teaspoon liquid stevia)
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 ½ cups dried fruit (raisins, cranberries, cherries, chopped apricots, chopped dates, etc.)

Enjoy!

Matt’s Global Search (MGS). Now that I’m on the outside, MGS is the piece I miss most. MGS searches all Automattic P2s of all time.  Ever wonder why something was done a certain way? Just search. You’ll likely find a thread from three years ago discussing the pros and cons of a half dozen approaches, and an explanation of why the fourth approach was picked. For the unacquainted, it takes some retraining to avoid asking a colleague every time you have a question. When you learn to search first, you become infinitely more capable (and ultimately end up in Barry’s good graces).

IRC for everything. IRC — you know, that really old technology like bulletin boards no one uses anymore? Yeah, it’s still really cool. It’s lightweight, you can use it on your desktop or phone, and it’s super hackable. You can pipe all sorts of things to IRC rooms. Like such as fatal errors… server load alerts… down notifications… When you couple your monitoring with IRC, it becomes a realtime health indicator of your platform, and an immediate point of collaboration for your team.

As I transition to my new role with Human Made’s increasingly distributed team, these tricks are at the forefront of my mind.

At the first fundraiser auction I ever go to, one for FACES Foundation last October, I end up with a week’s vacation at condo in Maui. I remember the setup clearly: a strong Pisco Sour to kick off the evening, red wine flowing throughout dinner, and the discomfort coming from being the youngest, and least formally dressed, person in the room. So, when the first item went up on the block, I ended up in a bidding war with the couple sitting beside me. And won.

We got to look forward to the trip for months. Spittle and Leah would be joining us for eight days at the end of March; a good ol’ fashioned, computer-free spring break in between lives of craziness. We had no plans other than plenty of sun, bananagrams, reading, and hanging out.

Considering we managed to hike and snorkel too, I think we were successful. Highlights include:

• Hiking Haleakala’s crater, particularly the walk out on fog-shrouded cliffs.
• Winning that one time at bananagrams.
• Touring every fro-yo shop on the island.
• Dinner on the last night at Star Noodle. Delicious.

Pro tip: groceries are unreasonably expensive unless you end up at Costco, where they seem to be the same price as stateside.

Hey would it be possible to limit the automatically marking as unresolved to one category? This would be particularly useful for my category ’tasks’ which need to be marked as unresolved when published (and then marked as resolved when completed).

It’s totally possible using a combination of a couple filters. Here’s what the annotated code snippet looks like:

[code lang=“php”] /** * P2 Resolved Posts: Only mark ’task’ posts as unresolved * * @see http://danielbachhuber.com/2013/04/18/p2-resolved-posts-only-mark-a-specific-category-as-unresolved/ */ // Marks all new posts as unresolved add_filter( ‘p2_resolved_posts_mark_new_as_unresolved’, ‘__return_true’ ); // Let us apply conditional logic to when posts are marked unresolved add_filter( ‘p2_resolved_posts_maybe_mark_new_as_unresolved’, ‘p2rpx_only_mark_tasks’, 10, 2 ); function p2rpx_only_mark_tasks( $ret, $post ) {

// Get all of the categories assigned to the post $cats = get_the_terms( $post->ID, ‘category’ ); // Make sure this didn’t return false or a WP_Error object if ( is_array( $cats ) ) {

// Use wp_filter_object_list() to see if there are any ’task’ terms $task = wp_filter_object_list( $cats, array( ‘slug’ => ’task’ ) ); // If there is a task term, we want to mark unresolved. Otherwise, no. if ( ! empty( $task ) ) $ret = true; else $ret = false; }

return $ret; } [/code]

However, in a stock P2 install, there isn’t a frontend interface for setting the category. The category is determined by the post format you use. Other users might be better off searching for tags by switching the term lookup to: get_the_terms( $post->ID, 'post_tag' );

Earlier this week I made the difficult decision to leave Automattic, where I’ve been working on the VIP team for just shy of two years. It’s been a tremendous ride — I’m truly proud of who I’ve been able to work with, and what we’ve been able to get done.

I’ve felt my personal growth slow in recent months, however. Considering where I’m at in my career, and that Leah is busy with school, I’m looking for a more challenging opportunity — one that pushes me to learn, grow, and lead. If you have or know of such an opportunity, I’d love to hear from you: d@danielbachhuber.com

Here’s my updated resume.

For the former, one idea that’s already come up: I’d love to contribute “Share to WordPress” integration. Oh, and it would be really neat to pull comments already on the post into the reading experience. There seem to be some type of comments limited to just NewsBlur.

The user experience has significant room for improvement. Hopefully he takes the dough he’s pulling in now to hire a proper designer.

It’s also been on my list for a long time to cull my feed subscriptions. Based on what I’m seeing, roughly 90% of blogs died between 2010 and early 2012.

On that note, you need to watch Anil Dash’s “The Web We Lost”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KKMnoTTHJk

“The first thing you do, when you succeed in Silicon Valley and your company is acquired, is destroy everyone’s wedding photos […] The reality is those of us that [cared about open formats] have lost.”

It’s time the Open Web became the cool thing to hack on again.

Applications to attend are due this coming Saturday, April 6th, at 9 pm Pacific. Apply now and please spread the word.

Many thanks to The Oregonian and the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project for their support.

Last year, I ended the season with an unbelievable day of skiing. Today, it happened again.

Riley, my dad, and I arrived just before open to 13 inches of fresh. Riley, the avid tree skier he is, led the way all over the mountain. Fresh tracks and face shots galore.

We finished with 16k feet of vertical in 14 runs. Reminder to self: increase the DIN setting on my Kilowatts so they don’t fly off so often.

Single-use P2 threads. P2 is an awesome theme for threaded conversations that stand the test of time. Avoid long, drawn out email discussions with friends by pointing everyone to a P2 thread.

A year ago you wrote… Emails of what you wrote in the past, a la Timehop.

Lock one or more dashboard widgets in place for everyone. The WordPress dashboard offers infinite customization. Sometimes you want to make sure a widget (e.g. site announcements) appears in the same place for everyone though.

Save Manage Posts filter state. It resets your query argument filters every time you navigate away.

Pretty darn neat. Maybe the future of journalism isn’t so far away after all? (via Greg)

<?php

if ( ! defined( 'WP\_CLI' ) ) return;

WP\_CLI::add\_command( 'pdxwp-presentation', 'PDXWP\_WP\_CLI\_Presentation\_Command' );

class PDXWP\_WP\_CLI\_Presentation\_Command extends WP\_CLI\_Command {

/\*\* \* Start the presentation with a demonstration \* \* @subcommand slide \* @synopsis <number> \*/ public function slide( $args ) {

list( $num ) = $args;

$slides = array( 0 => array( 'header' => 'wp-cli is for WP devs on a deadline (http://wp-cli.org)', 'body' => array( 'Daniel Bachhuber', 'daniel@automattic.com', '@danielbachhuber', ), ), 1 => array( 'header' => 'What is wp-cli?', 'body' => array( '- A Command Line Interface for WordPress', '- A powerful tool for manipulating WordPress', '- A nascent WordPress community project with lots of opportunity for contributions', ), ), 2 => array( 'header' => 'Why is it useful to me?', 'body' => array( '- Open wp shell to execute arbitrary functions', '- Install, update, or delete plugins', '- Create posts, users, terms', '- More easily manage lots of client sites', '- Export a large amount of data', '- Scaffold a theme, plugin, or unit tests for a plugin', ), ), 3 => array( 'header' => 'Where do I start?', 'body' => array( '- Install wp-cli', '- (monkey dance)', '- Profit!', ), ), 4 => array( 'header' => 'How do I install?', 'body' => array( 'On your command line:', '- git clone git://github.com/wp-cli/wp-cli.git ~/git/wp-cli', '- cd ~/git/wp-cli', '- curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php', '- php composer.phar install', ), ), 5 => array( 'header' => 'How do I write my own command?', 'body' => array( '- Create a class extending WP\_CLI\_Command', "- Register your command with WP\_CLI::add\_command( 'pdxwp-presentation', 'PDXWP\_WP\_CLI\_Presentation\_Command' );", '- public methods are subcommands', '- PHPdoc allows you to set a <synopsis>', '- Sekret pro tip: Package useful commands with your plugins :)', ), ), 6 => array( 'header' => 'Now go! http://wp-cli.org', 'body' => array( ), ), );

passthru( '/opt/local/bin/clear' ); if ( ! empty( $slides\[(int)$num\] ) ) { $slide = $slides\[(int)$num\]; for( $i = 0; $i < 23; $i++ ) {

if ( $i == 3 ) { $this->line( $slide\['header'\] ); continue; }

if ( $i == 6 ) { foreach( $slide\['body'\] as $line ) { $this->line( $line ); $i++; } } $this->line(); } } else { WP\_CLI::error( "No slide #{$num}" ); }

}

private function line( $out = '' ) { WP\_CLI::line( " " . $out ); }

}

Here’s what the presentation actually looked like:

Never miss an opportunity for adventure is my motto. When DJ posted on Facebook that he was headed to Utah for a conference and wanted to ski, I immediately jumped on it. We ended up skiing Brighton for a few days with his friends David and Jeffrey.

The most important details:

• Day one: 15k feet of vertical in 13 runs before lunch.
• Day two: 22k feet of vertical in 19 runs in the afternoon / early evening. Beer break midway.
• Day three: 18k feet of vertical in 16 runs before lunch. Hot cocoa midway to defrost.

Secondary details:

• Brighton Lodge is a pretty sweet basecamp for skiing Brighton. It’s literally right next to the lift. A four person dorm room runs $129/night.
• Bring groceries and alcohol, as the evening dining options are limited and expensive.
• Pray for snow. We got sun, but only a couple inches of fresh on Monday night. Had there been a dumping, much more of the mountain would’ve opened up.
• It was fun thinking I could split skiing and work, but next time we’re instituting a no-laptop policy. I ended up working more hours than I wanted to, and everyone else spent equal hours if not more on their posters.

Best of luck to DJ, Jeffrey and David on their presentations!

You are the epitome of web application. When others change their interface seemingly on a monthly basis, your beautiful design hasn’t change as long as I’ve subscribed to your services. We first met September, 2007. You’ve resisted the temptation to muck with a jewel that already works really, really well.

When you were undergoing scheduled maintenance two days ago, I realized how important you are to my life. You are the very first icon in my bookmarks bar. You are the most accessible location on my iPhone screen; I sync you hourly.

My girlfriend and I share you to keep track of the groceries we need to buy, and the chores we need to do. A simple shared list goes a long way towards de-cluttering the house of bits of paper.

It may have been around as long as I have, but “Inbox Email Address” is a recently discovered pleasure. If I need to jot down a few tasks, boom. If I need to inbox zero my email but log action items, done.

You bring new meaning to the phrase “getting things done.” Thanks to you I never lose track of anything I need to do. Although I may procrastinate on the top priority items, you pay attention to the number of times I postpone and flag it for me if it’s too many.

Thank you, Remember the Milk, for all that you do. Keep on rockin'.

To truly know a place, you have to walk its hills. And New Zealandia has some pretty nice hills.

Nah, that’s too profound. Really, after two weeks living in hotels, I was just jonesin’ to get outside. To commemorate a beautiful day yesterday, Dan, Nikki, and I trekked the hillside above Eastbourne, directly across the water from Wellington.

It took us forever to get to a decent vantage point though. The trail picked up at the edge of town where it wound up and up to get to the ridge line. New Zealandia is densely forested and the forest doesn’t let up at the top of the hills. If it was possible, I think it gets denser. So we bumped over hillock after hillock, some offering little openings that made us optimistic. Ultimately, I snagged the shot above at an overlook about half way down.

A good hike deserves good food. After the trek, we enjoyed a late lunch at a neat beach-side cafe. I had a panini-esque sandwich they call a “toastie.” Oh capers, it was delicious. Capers may be the new ingredient I sneak into everything.

An aside: if there was a difficult thing about traveling in New Zealand, it would be the use of comical words for everyday things. A cooler is a “chilly bin.” The baggage claim is the “baggage reclaim.” Oh, and most cars are imported from Japan so all dashboard buttons are in Kanji. Maybe that leads to it.

At the end of the day, I parted ways with Dan and Nikki, became amazed that New Zealandia doesn’t have security checkpoints for domestic flights, and flew down to Christchurch.

This morning, once I was fueled with a delicious scramble, I took off on hike number two of the weekend. Parts of Christchurch, including my Airbnb spot, are conveniently located next to Lake District-esque hills. If you aren’t paying attention to where you’re going, as I wasn’t, you can easily end up lost in a neighborhood. Fortunately, after three false starts, I found a path leading above the houses.

It took about an hour and a half to get to the top of Mount Vernon, where I took the photo above. Along the way, I became reacquainted with my love of podcasts. Podcasts are a great way to expand your worldview, and I need to get back into them.

I’ll be in Christchurch for a couple more days, hopefully finding a good place to cowork. Then it’s back to Portland, Leah, and a tasty East African cooking course at the end of the week.

I want one of these when I grow up.

The first was Clay Johnson’s “Industrialized Ignorance,” a look at the current state of the media. Clay argues that, much like how industrial food production gives us food that tastes good, but isn’t necessarily good for us, industrial media focuses on producing content with entertainment value, instead of informational value. To combat this, we need to launch an equivalent “whole food movement” for information.

I like the metaphor, and maybe the solution can be reapplied too. For all that the government has done to improve diet (e.g. not much), I believe the greatest successes come at the individual, family, and community level. Food is very much tied to physicality.

On the web, geography matters less. We’re equally as influenced by the people around us, but we have choice in who we follow, friend and subscribe to. In this way we can, figuratively, pick out the fruits and vegetables we’ll be choosing from for our meals later in the week. The first step to take, though, is to start cooking for yourself.

Not checking email before writing 500 words is a simple hack I’d like to take to heart. Instinctively, I reached for my phone this morning as soon as I opened my eyes. The phone went into low battery mode before I made it to the mail app. I took that as a sign today was the day to start.

“Oh, I’m too busy to spend write 500 words every day,” one might think. Or, “I have nothing to write about.” As WordPress’ distraction-free writing says, just write. The words will come to you.

The second talk that really hit home was Karen McGrane’s “Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content.” Yes, it does sound like it’s about responsive design. Instead, she promoted producing content independent of platform. If your content is well structured, Karen argues, you’re in a much better position to reflow it into a variety of platforms.

This sounds familiar. In fact, it sounds like what many of us have been promoting as the future of journalism. Stijn wrote about it in 2010. Adrian wrote about it in 2006. In the last year, the conversation has all but died.

Personally, I’ve found enjoyment in more mundane projects, generally falling under the “improving administrative tasks in content management systems” category. Reinventing the entire content creation process is an unknown, nebulous challenge.

It was nice to be inspired to think big again. We need to bring some of that discussion back. And, while we’re at it, open standards too. Remember those?

434 words. I’ll take it.

Chris Coyier is a humorous man. He was also a designer at Wufoo and now does CSS Tricks and CodePen. Today he’s covering:

1. Getting started designing.
2. Local development environment.
3. Working on a team.
4. Preprocessing saves happiness.
5. Testing, testing, testing.

Chris designs in Photoshop, to the faux-horror of everyone in the room. Photoshop is more “left brainy” than a CSS editor. It affords more creativity. WebZap gives you buttons and other web patterns to use in your mockups.

The blank canvas is a challenge for every profession. In the design world, you might:

• Toss down a texture.
• Draw some shapes.
• Avoid making wireframes.

As soon as you have a Minimum Viable Design in Photoshop, though, take it to the web. Making it perfect in Photoshop just means you’ll have to do the work all over again.

“Let’s change the phrase ‘designing in the browser’ to ‘deciding in the browser’.” - Some Guy I Missed

Don’t work live on a server. Just don’t.

Instead, you can and should develop in a local environment. If you’re building for WordPress, MAMP is a good option to provide everything you need to run a web server.

Two tools to demystify version control: Github for Mac and Tower.

Chris is all about the Sublime Text. In version 3, being able to jump to files is amazeballs. Emmet does all sorts of crazy HTML auto-completion.

Some advantages to using a preprocessor like Sass:

• DRY awesomeness.
• Mixins allow you to define named functions, and use those functions elsewhere in your Sass. Everyone screws up CSS3 vendor prefixes. Mixins allow you to only screw up (and fix) in one place.

Sass plus Compass gives you an amazing number predefined mixins.

Editor’s note: All of this frontend hotness is blowing my mind. I didn’t even know.

Preprocessing also greatly simplifies media queries. And it makes writing CSS fun again.

CodeKit is a Mac app that automagically preprocesses all of your shiz. It will inject style changes into your browser while you edit. Great for when you might need to style web apps with various states. It can also losslessly compress any image assets used in your site.

The easiest way to make a website faster is to load less stuff. If you can’t remove it entirely, you can concatenate and minimize.

Testing is a big PITA. BrowserStack lets you test in a variety of browsers from the comfort of your own home.