a8cgm Austin automattic bowen island cloudfest development do_action git github harley davidson hero instagram iOS javascript jetpack kareless latergram lonestardrift meetup mercury officetoday photo101 photos php phptek pistol pokemongo Programming react rome scm ted travelmattic vancouver video wcbos wcdfw wcokc wcus whistler wichita falls woocommerce wooconf wordcamp WordPress
Day 2 of the Photo 101 challenge took me to downtown Wichita Falls, Tx to get some pictures with a “street” theme.
I used my Nikon D3200 with 50mm prime lens. Due to my inexperience, I didn’t take a tripod with me. Lesson learned.
I got a few shots, but here is my favorite.
Here is a gallery of some other images from tonight.
Blogging for me has always been a very cyclical thing. The cycle looks something like this:
Some of the reasons for this are that I feel like my site has no purpose and that my thoughts don’t matter in the context of the entire Internet. I have found myself thinking that surely there is someone smarter and more eloquent than I am that can, and is, describing any topic that I write about…
This cycle I go through is what interested me in Mike Johnston’s flash talk at the 2014 Grand Meetup in Utah.
Mike’s presentation had to do largely with his recent dislike of personal blogging, which hit home with me because I find that I tend to blog in patterns.
I was currently going through a dislike of blogging myself, which I found odd because I work at Automattic (company behind WordPress.com).
At the grand meetup I brought this subject up to James Huff who gave me a few words of wisdom which he’s used to build his blog to 3,000+ followers. The most impactful thing that James told me was that I should change the way I look at my blog — I should start looking at my blog as something meant for me, such as a way to look back at my life.
This really changed things for me as I could then blog without worrying about whether the message fit into some overall strategy or purpose. From now on, I could simply post things that I thought were interesting, helpful, funny, etc.
The overall result so far has been a very noticeable increase in how much I post to my blog. You can see this for yourself by comparing the 16 posts I wrote in October to the single post I wrote in June.
In the past month or so, I have blogged about a greater variety of things, including: photos, development tutorials, the death of my daughter, and my work at Automattic.
Photo Credit: Kristina B
I’m doing the Photo a Day challenge from WordPress.com. Todays assignment was “Home”. I decided to go with an abstract idea of home and take a picture of my son, Hero.
This picture was at Taco Bueno this morning as he was eating a couple of breakfast burritos.
Of all of the greatness at the Automattic grand meetup this year in Utah, one of the most impactful moments was Andrew Spittle’s call to do a better job of dogfooding our apps.
For those who don’t know, dogfooding is the practice of using your own products. This goes a bit beyond simply testing products. Instead, the idea is that a company uses its own product to be able to more fully evaluate it.
At Automattic we do this by using our own software such as WordPress.com, Jetpack, and CloudUp as well as testing internal only builds of the WordPress mobile apps before they’re released to the public.
Andrew’s talk presented the fact that Automatticians used social networks such as Facebook and Twitter much more than they did WordPress when using a certain hashtag — #a8cgm if I recall correctly.
After Andrew pointed out the disparity in how Automatticians share their experiences, he mentioned that he wondered how many bug reports and UX suggestions we missed out on by not using our own software.
Wow… That was such a way to put it.
Up until this point I thought I had been dogfooding Automattic’s products. But, the reality was that while I moved my site over to WordPress.com, I wasn’t using much of the functionality on WordPress.com or the WordPress iOS and Android apps that I had installed. :facepalm:
Starting right away, I began to use all things Automattic much more often. My website is on WordPress.com. I have the beta versions of both the iOS and Android apps installed on my devices. I use Simplenote periodically for taking notes.
Since making more of an effort to use Automattic products, I have been surprised at how many bugs I have found and reported.
The beauty is that all it took was to start using our products more, which is the true power of dogfooding. Each bug we find ourselves is an opportunity to give our users a better experience.
As a developer, it’s very easy to test things how they should work, which is why we often miss bugs. When an entire company dogfoods its prodcuts, you’re getting experience and feedback from all sorts of people which will help find those edge cases and unexpected usage patterns.
Photo Credit: laffy4k
I recently added a keyboard shortcut to a project I was working on.
And while I have used the jQuery Hotkeys plugin for adding keyboard shortcuts recently, I didn’t use a plugin for this project since I only needed a single keyboard shortcut.
Taking a large bit of inspiration from Krasimir Tsonev, who also documented his solution, I came up with this:
[javascript]
(function( $ ) {
var $doc = $( document );
$doc.ready( function(){
$doc.on( ‘keydown’, function( e ){
if ( ! $( e.target ).is( ‘:input’ ) ) {
// props rauchg for pointing out e.shiftKey
if ( 87 == e.which && e.shiftKey ) {
// `shift` and `w` are pressed. Do something.
}
}
});
});
})( jQuery );
[/javascript]
First, I create an anonymous function wrapper and invoke it while passing jQuery as a parameter. This allows me to use the $ syntax for jQuery without worrying about collisions with other libraries.
Then, after the DOM has loaded, I attach a keydown event handler to the document. Before I run any logic though, I check to make sure that we are currently not within any input type. This is important as I don’t want to trigger keyboard shortcuts when a user is typing.
After the code ensures that we are not in an input, I check to see if both the shift key and w have been pressed. If so, do some magic!
Very proud to work at a company that was just awarded 5 out of 5 stars by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for having our user’s backs.
But, possibly better, is the fact that WordPress.com maintains a Hall of Shame for those that try to abuse copyright and trademark powers.
As a developer, keyboard shortcuts are a necessary part of life. And as a web developer, I use several shortcuts within Chrome as well:
? + t: new tab? + ^ + i: open developer tools? + shift + {: shift one tab to the left? + shift + }: shift one tab to the right? + w: close current tab? + q: quit ChromeAnd if you’ve used the above shortcuts for any period of time, you’ve likely accidentally quit Chrome when you meant to close the current tab. :facepalm:
This used to happen for me at least once a week… until I found Chrome’s Warn Before Quitting option.
This obscure gem can be found under the Chrome menu. When enabled, you will need to hold ? + q to quit Chrome.
Excited that WordPress.com is hosting a photo a day course for the month of November. Sounds like the push I need to dust off the SLR that we bought and rarely ever use!
Sara knew that I would think Hero having a WordPress shirt on for his school picture was cute.
This past Thursday began like many other days at Automattic. I woke up a bit late in the morning and reached over to grab my phone so I could catch up on the company chatter.
Beau posted a few messages to let me know that he was pushing version 1 of some experimental code we were testing for a small group of Automatticians. We had tested the patch the night before, so I was pretty confident.
I hopped out of bed and went to the bathroom so I could get ready for the day. Within minutes, chatter started picking up…
Turns out that for all of the testing I had done the previous day, I never thought to see what the experimental feature looked like in wp-admin. :facepalm:
On the plus side, I had written all of the code for this feature, so when I heard what was wrong, I had a really good idea of what caused it and how to fix it. I was able to fix the issue and test that it worked across several sites within 10 minutes. But, this was only the beginning…
Today was also the day that I would finally get commit access to WordPress.com. This meant that along with fixing the patch that was just committed, I would also have to figure out how to commit to WordPress.com without breaking all the things. I was a bit nervous…
Beau gave me a quick rundown of the process for committing and deploying to WordPress.com and then let me get to work with a final, “let me know if you run into any issues.”
To say I was nervous at this point would be an understatement. I’ve pushed to repositories before that were owned by a small team, but knowing that what I committed pretty shortly would be affecting millions of people was a bit surreal.
After triple checking that the latest patch worked correctly, and running svn up multiple times, I finally committed the code, but not being familiar with vim, I accidentally posted without a message.
I was able to learn more about the deploy process as well as successfully commit a patch. After everything was said and done, I didn’t break WordPress.com and I learned, so I’ll call it a success.
It was interesting seeing these sauce packets at Taco Bell since this is a topic that Sara and I have talked about often.
When developing for the web, sometimes I want to JSONify an object to throw into Sublime Text for an easier look or maybe to compare two separate objects.
While it’s easy to log an object in Google Chrome, the issue I have is easily getting that from the console to Sublime Text.
After doing a bit of searching, I found that Google Chrome has a copy function that will copy any text to the clipboard.
Here are a couple of ways that you could use this function:
To copy any string, simply use
[javascript]
copy( "some string here" );
[/javascript]
To copy a JSONified object, you could use something like:
[code lang=javascript]
copy( JSON.stringify( object ) );
[/code]
For the longest time, I have very quietly been irritated by my desktops (spaces) being rearranged automatically.
My workflow usually involves using at least 3 desktops, one each for:
– Chrome and Terminal
– IDE of choice ( PhpStorm for now )
– Spotify
When these desktops periodically reordered themselves it was quite annoying since I would then be guessing which order the desktops were in, which complicates using keyboard shortcuts to switch between desktops.
Turns out that there’s an easy fix.
If you go to System Preferences > Mission Control, you can uncheck the box that says
“Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use.”
Here’s a screenshot:
Jake VanDonge just released a compilation video from last year’s Zombie Crawl in Wichita Falls.
Here’s the status that he posted:
Get a bigger look of what our 5K is all about! Darkness, smoke bombs, zombies & more! Sign up at http://getinfected.org 10.25.2014 Huge thanks to Isaiah, Eric & Alex for helping me & Jeanette shoot video of the 5K last year! Killer job!
Today marked one year since Scarlett was born, so we sang happy birthday to her and then released balloons.
In my family, I’m known to be cold and calculating at times. But last night, that all faded as I silently cried while my girlfriend lay beside me.
After a few minutes, I reached out for the first time in a year and told Sara, “I miss Scarlett.”
Last October 10th started out like most other days, until Sara told me that she felt that something was wrong and wanted to go to the doctor. I was a bit irritated at this point because I thought she was just being panicky… After all, Hero’s mom had us go to the doctor at least 6 times for false labor. Surely, Sara was just overreacting?
But once we got to the doctor, my tune changed very quickly. Within a short period of time, the doctor told us that we needed to go ahead and induce labor. All of a sudden, the fact that I was going to be a father (again) hit.
I took Sara to the hospital, got her checked in to the delivery room, then ran home to pack a bag. We hadn’t prepared quite enough for this.
Within 5-10 minutes of leaving the hospital, I got a call saying that there were complications and that they were going to do an emergency c-section within minutes. I immediately raced back to the hospital, put the surgery gear on, and waited nervously.
Another few minutes and I was watching the doctor cut open Sara to deliver Scarlett. I tried calming Sara down by holding her hand, but I kept getting sidetracked by the sight of the surgery.
After the doctor delivered Scarlett, they immediately began to work on her. We could feel that something was wrong, but I was certain that the doctors and nurses had everything under control.
With every passing minute, Sara became much more irritated and anxious to hold Scarlett, which pushed me to check in with the doctors. “Why can’t I hold Scarlett yet? What’s wrong?”
I can’t remember all of the steps that came next, but at some point I remember the doctors telling us that Scarlett would need to be flown to Cook Childrens Hospital in Fort Worth (about 2 hours away), because the local doctors couldn’t help her any more.
At first the doctors told us that Sara was not going to be allowed to leave the hospital at the same time that Scarlett was air-evaced. While Sara complied with this for an hour or two, eventually she told us all that she would be leaving the hospital with or without approval.
A few hours later, we found ourselves in Fort Worth and were racing to find where Scarlett is. Against my pleading, Sara insisted on speed walking, even though her abdomen had been cut open and stapled back just a few hours earlier.
Eventually, we got to a nurses station and were briskly led to where Scarlett is being tested. At this point, we also managed to find a wheelchair and I began pushing Sara around. Probably a bit slower than she would’ve liked to go.
We are taken to some room where we are not allowed any metallic objects, we had to put on earplugs, and we sat and watched as some loud recurring noise played. I can’t remember what this test was.
Eventually, we make our way to Scarlett’s room, where we would be for the next few days. There was a chair and a pull out couch in the room and we were told that we could sleep in the room, and were likely expected to.
Scarlett was subject to a ton of tests while Sara and I watched and waited, but one test hit Sara and I especially hard…
I remember the doctor talking to us about Scarlett’s condition. She was using some very scientific and technical terms, but I could understand the undertone.
After listening for a few minutes, I simply asked the doctor, “So, you’re essentially telling me that Scarlett is brain dead, right? You don’t have to sugar coat this.”
The doctor replied with, “I think that you and Sara understand the situation, and are handling this well.”
The doctor went on to clarify that Scarlett wasn’t technically brain dead, but that her brain was dying.
Shortly after this, we began receiving more frequent visits from people other than Scarlett’s doctor. At one point, I can’t remember if some visitor had prompted us, Sara and I began to talk about quality of life and decided that if tests continued to show no brain activity, that we would choose to take Scarlett off of life support.
One might think that choosing to let your daughter die was the hardest decision that Sara and I had to make. But, that was really just the start.
All of the decisions came next. Should we donate her organs? Do we have a funeral? How do we pay for the after death costs?
But, the hardest part was holding Scarlett in both of our arms and watching Scarlett slowly die.
Now, one year later, I can, at times, see very clearly how Scarlett’s death has affected us.
There are times that I see our friends’ children and wonder how it would have been to have a daughter.
I have even more of a dislike towards all things religion.
There have also been effects on my relationship with Sara. One of the biggest being that Sara and I deal with Scarlett’s death in very different ways.
My particular approach was to shut it out, while Sara broke down often. Sara had a very hard time understanding, and probably still does, why I didn’t cry or hurt as much and like she did.
Last year I remember breaking down and crying as I stood beside Scarlett’s bed. I sobbed in Sara’s arms, something I told her at the time would only ever happen that once. Maybe it’s a good thing I felt something last night.
In the end, the thing I most want to impart is that we all deal with loss much differently. If you have a loved whose reactions and thoughts you don’t understand, I urge you to be patient with him or her.
I recently needed to update an array of models to add a “reflowed” attribute to a comment which would act as a flag to show that the comment had been reordered.
When I was working through this issue, the first thing that came to mind was that I could update the model attributes myself.
This is possible with the following syntax.
[code lang=javascript]
model.attributes.attribute = value;
[/code]
But, this isn’t good software development. So, I trashed that idea.
The Backbone way to update a model is:
[code lang=javascript]
model.set( { attribute: value } )
[/code]
But, by default, this will trigger a change event on every changed attribute. For my use case, triggering change events for several models wasn’t necessary.
Looking into the annotated Backbone source code, I noticed that I could pass in an options array that set silent to true. This makes the model update look like this:
[code lang=javascript]
model.set( { attribute, value }, { silent: true } );
[/code]
