One of the things I wanted to do during my sabbatical (more on that later this week) was to create (from scratch) a new block theme for my site. I haven’t done this in a long time and thought it’d be a good way to get familiar with the state of block themes as a whole. In my role at WooCommerce I’ve been working deep in different parts of the block and site editors but haven’t spent as much time building things, for fun. Today, I launched the theme on my site. It’s not packaged for public distribution – if there’s interest I might – as I consider my design skills “highly niche” so might just stay bespoke for a while. I’ll do a full write up on the experience at some point.
Latest post
-
Sabbatical, a Gift
I’m sitting here writing this post, with a few days left in my 3 month Sabbatical. One of the great perks of working for Automattic is that every 5 years I have the opportunity to take a 2-3 month fully paid time away from my regular work with no expectations beyond disconnecting from work. It is a blessed, and very kind, gift. I’m fully aware that I’m already fortunate to live and work in a job that pays well for the needs of me and my family – affording some “wants” too – and live in a part of the… Keep reading →
history
-
Something every Language/Library debate needs to keep in mind….
There’s some discussion happening right now in the WordPress world about what javascript framework to add to WP core. These kind of debates happen frequently in the programming world (Google “PHP sucks” for some great examples). In the course of these types of discussions, support is usually brought up for one point of view or another by…
-
On Vision
This is a post that has been percolating as a draft post for nearly two or three months now. But as a theme, its something I’ve wrestled with far longer. Those who know me well, know that at my core, I’m kind of a systems and strategy kind of guy. What makes gets my ticker picking…
-
Using circleci.com for automated WordPress plugin testing.
A few months ago, one of the teams I work with went on the hunt for a good continuous integration service for running tests on the code we write. We jumped on the unit test bandwagon at the beginning of the year and wanted to really amp up the quality of our product by having tests…
-
If I was in charge of a telecommunications company…
Yes, this is one of those “If I was in charge, I’d do this…” posts. Don’t we all have opinions on how companies should be run? Just had these thoughts today so decided to write them down. Canada is known as one of the worst places for mobile phone plans (from a consumer perspective), largely…
-
FireHost and WordPress Multi-site… how well do they play together?
Recently, one of my clients purchased a server with FireHost.com. We’d been on the search for a new web host for some time now to serve as the infrastructure supporting upcoming web applications we have in the works. We needed a company who is well recommended, and will help us scale and scale quickly. You pay…
-
WP 3.7 drops with an interesting surprise…
I thought I was following the development of WordPress 3.7 fairly closely but something totally missed my notice and only caught my attention when a plugin I develop stopped working with the latest version of WordPress. The culprit? do_action( ‘save_post’, $post_ID, $post, $update ); Notice anything different? The difference is that this hook used to only have…
-
Get wp-cli running with MAMP
I got really intrigued with the wp-cli tool for command line WordPress (seriously awesome, check it out)… however I haven’t switched my osx machine to use the built in php and mysql so I kept getting this error: ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (2) Easy fix: sudo ln…
-
The conversations you have with yourself…
…impact what you do and how you feel. What have you told yourself lately? Have you been an encourager or a life sapper? Do you hear justification or warning? Do you bargain with yourself or hear, “you can do better?” The inner voice is a powerful influence on our lives. This is why you must…
-
path not plan
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.” Right, but also wrong. I’ve seen people who are terrible planners succeed, and people who are meticulous planners fail. Yet something else, seems to work. Path. Those who have a path, who have a…
-
What’s your inspiration?
What gets you up in the morning? What is it that you look forward to doing/seeing/engaging in the most? What makes your heart beat a bit faster and your mind spark? Your inspiration is your fuel. When’s the last time you filled that tank? Go do it. Now.