Sara went to a wine glass painting party tonight, which, let’s be honest, is probably just a pretext for Sara and her girlfriends to get together and drink wine.
That’s great though. Sara needs non-family time.
But Hero didn’t like the idea of mom going to a women only party. He wondered where him and I were going for our guy party.
At first, I told him that we wouldn’t have a party. Then I gave in and walked Hero to the ice cream store to have a guy party.
Today, Sara and I received a shipment of three Afremov prints from Afremovart.com.
I bought my first oil painting by Afremov about a year ago, and to this day, I’m still in love with his style.
Several years ago, I wouldn’t have considered paying for a painting. But I gladly keep buying paintings and prints by Afremov.
Tonight was the LifeGift memorial service where those who died and donated their organs are remembered.
We also went by Cook Childrens Hospital while in Fort Worth to see the memorial at the hospital for the first time.
This past Friday night, a coworker on Mercury, Enej Bajgoric, shared this video of Angelina Fabbro speaking at JSConfUS 2013.
Based on the title of the video, I was certain that I would come away with a more advanced understanding of closures or some other JavaScript topic.
But, I was pleasantly surprised that the video was non-technical. Instead, Angelina talked about topics such as:
The video is just over 22 minutes and, in my opinion, well worth the time it takes to watch.
I’ve previously written articles about becoming a code wrangler and my experience of working at Automattic.
If you happened across my article but were more interested in what it meant to be a happiness engineer at Automattic, Olark recently wrote an article about customer service at WordPress.com.
My favorite part of the article was this paragraph where Andrew Spittle talked about a memorable encounter that he had with a customer.
Then the other experience for me personally that stands out is talking with a customer, and ultimately, the issue they were running into was not something we could fix. They were going to have to go contact their domain registrar. When we broke this news to them, they said, “Oh. I don’t want to go contact my domain registrar, because they don’t have Happiness Engineers. They have Gestapos of Grief.”
Source: Olark Live Chat – Engineering Customer Service at WordPress.com
Shortly after starting at Automattic, I became interested in optimistic interfaces after Beau critiqued some work I had done on O2.
One of the best videos I found to introduce and demonstrate optimistic web interfaces was this one of Guillermo Rauch, who happens to be a coworker at Automattic, speaking at dotJS 2013.
I don’t know where it started, but Hero has a new habit of commenting “There’s nothing like {insert some object or activity here}”.
We went to get fried chicken for dinner the other day, and as is customary, we had rolls with honey. Hero commented, “there’s nothing like bread and honey.”
This past Sunday, we all went to Hastings to have some coffee and do a bit of (school)?work.
Hero has twisted his ankle earlier in the day while running. So, when we got to Hastings, we asked for a small bag of ice to put on his ankle.
Hero commented, “there’s nothing like putting my foot on the table with ice.”
It’s one thing to know which sort to use given a situation, but it’s much more interesting to see a sort in action.
Here are a couple of videos that will show sorts at work.
I came across this video that shows pictures of intersections in Wichita Falls from today and about 40 years ago.
It was interesting to be able to look at my city 40 years ago.
Today was a rough morning for Hero.
Sara and I decided that we would go to church for the first time in years, so we aimed to get up at 9am today.
As I woke up Hero, he said to me, “but Dad, it’s holiday. You can’t wake me up!”
Throughout the morning, Hero cried several times for little things such as us not finding his undershirt and not being able to wear his Bumblebee belt.
But the best part of the morning happened as we were getting out of the car. As Sara opened the door, Hero said, “I’ve got donut dirt on my pants.”
Tonight we went to the annual spaghetti fundraiser at Hero’s school. For $8, I got a plate full of spaghetti, a plate full of salad, and a couple of breadsticks as well as a cookie and drink.
Turned out to be quite a good deal.
I loved reading about WIRED’s recent work on their site.
Specifically, it was great reading about how WIRED merged 17 active WordPress installs into one and created a custom plugin for curating content:
The redesign gives us the third incarnation of our Curator application, which started years ago as a separate Groovy on Grails application maintained by a single Java developer. Curator once consumed articles from 35 different blogs for curation on our homepage. When we migrated our 17 active WordPress blogs into one WordPress install, we also rewrote Curator…
Our new and improved Curator is now a custom WordPress plugin—and it’s artificially intelligent! This allows our homepage and section landing pages to be both automated and curated at the same time.
Read the rest of the article on WIRED.com
The React.js conference was held last month, but tickets were not easy to come by.
Never fear though, because the React.js team recently came out with a Round-up post of some of the best content from the React.js conference.
Being new to React.js myself, I’m looking forward to taking away a few nuggets that I can apply to WordPress.com.
I think today might have been my very first burrito Friday. It’s an Automattic thing.
So, to properly celebrate, I decided to go to Chipotle, which just recently opened. The burrito was so big that they couldn’t completely wrap it with the foil.
The only class that I’ve ever truly worried about passing was my compiler design class with Mr. Richard Simpson at Midwestern State University.
While the material was interesting at times, it was almost always several levels over my head and I had a hard time keeping up.
Even though I constantly worried about passing that class, I did have quite a bit of fun with at least one project in that class — Converting the C based interpreter for Mouse into any language of our choice. You can probably guess that I decided to go with PHP 🙂
I’m not sure why I was fond of that language. It was esoteric, hard as hell to understand, and there was almost no chance that I would ever use it for any practical situation.
After all, looking at this sample program below, do you have any idea what’s going on?
[code]
"Enter a positive number that you would like fibonacci numbers up to."
A0=
B1=
C1=
D?="You entered: "D.!"!"
"Fibonacci Sequence: "
(D.C.-^ A.!" "AB.=BC.= CA.B.+=)
A.!" "B.!
"!"
$$
[/code]
But something about it was enjoyable. Which is why I geeked out so hard the other day when I came across an old copy of the Mouse: A Language for Microcomputers.
Now that I’ve got the book, I’m considering creating a JavaScript based interpreter for Mouse.
Until then, here’s a link to the PHP based interpreter of Mouse that I came up with about a year ago.
https://github.com/ebinnion/Mouse-Playground/blob/master/translations/mouse79.php
At this point, the interpreter doesn’t include macros, but should run all of the sample programs in my Mouse repository.
Part of my Git workflow at Automattic includes getting a pull request going as soon as possible.
I find this workflow useful as I am learning the code base for the latest version of WordPress.com, which is completely different from any codebase I have touched before. Because of this, I try to commit often so that I can get feedback and collaborate with my coworkers.
And while committing often is great to get feedback in a pull request, I tend to like to squash all of the commits into one before I merge my pull request into master.
The first few times I squashed commits with Git were very nerve wracking as I was worried about nuking my changeset. But, as I have worked more with Git in a team setting, I have become very comfortable with these following steps:
git merge-base my-branch-name mastergit rebase --interactive {hash from merge base}pick to squash for all but first commitAlthough I have grown comfortable with the above commands, I find that I sometimes still refer to this awesome article from edX about rebasing pull requests.
If you find you need a bit more explanation for how to squash commits with Git, I’d recommend giving that article a read.
Today was an early day for us since we decided to go to the pancake festival at 7 am!
We had a great time and had plenty to eat.
Also, notice that Sara brought her own jar of peanut butter :p
When my mom remarried a couple of years ago, she did something that I thought was really cool.
At the wedding ceremony, visitors were given disposable cameras so that they could take an active role in the wedding by helping to take pictures.
I thought this was a great idea for a couple of reasons:
But, as I recall, not many people ended up using the cameras.
I think the main issue is that disposable cameras are a big pain in the ass. Disposable cameras have to be manually wound for each shot, the button has to be pushed to charge the flash, and the packaging is a pain to open.
While the disposable cameras were a great idea, in hindsight, it makes sense that it didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped.
Compare the process of taking pictures with disposable cameras to taking a picture with my iPhone where once I am in the camera app I can just keep tapping to take more pictures.
What if there were was a way to get pictures that your friends and family took without having to track them all down?
Well, there is such a thing. IFTT has a tool/recipe that will allow you to automagically save any images that your friends take at your wedding into a Dropbox folder!
Check the recipe out here: https://ifttt.com/recipes/188138-save-your-wedding-s-instagram-hashtag-photos-to-dropbox
I believe that crowdsourcing images for a wedding is a great idea, and can result in great candid shots.
That being said, I wouldn’t consider having a wedding without a professional photographer — And I would recommend that you hire a photographer as well.