Year in Review: 2018

A reflection on family, business, and travel. See also: 2015, 2014, 2013.

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.

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Software I use, December 2018 edition

In October, I bought a new MacBook Pro and did a fresh install. I took notes on the software I installed with the hopes of sharing them with the world (as I did in 2014 and 2011). It’s now December and I finally have time to write the blog post. Busy!

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A New Kind of Economy — An Interview with Andrew Yang

My honest feeling is that the entire capitalism/socialism framing is decades old and unproductive. So, what I’m suggesting is that we need to evolve to the next stage of capitalism, which prioritizes human wellbeing and development. If someone were to say to me, for example, hey, you’re for universal health care, and that’s an idea I associate with socialists…I would shrug and say, sure. [Laughs.] You know? I just think the labels are unfortunate. People have very strong associations with each one.

A friend of mine, Eric Weinstein, said a couple of things that I thought were very profound. First, he said we never knew that capitalism was going to be eaten by its son—technology. Second, we have to become both radically capitalist and radically socialist in different aspects of American life and the economy. And I think both of those things are true.

I just don’t think it’s constructive to try and pick a spot in this arbitrary capitalism/socialism spectrum. What I believe is we have to redefine our economy and re-write the rules so that it centers around us. Capitalism’s efficiency and GDP are going to have an increasingly nonexistent relationship to how most Americans are doing.

Andrew Yang – A New Kind of Economy — An Interview with Andrew Yang

Three flavors of Gutenberg backwards compatibility

This is my attempt at answering an issue I opened in January. Please take my opinions with a grain of salt.

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.