Dan Q

Note #21487

I have minus 26 new articles in my RSS reader! Either I’m a time traveller, or there’s a wraparound bug when you neglect your unreads for long enough.

Both seem equally likely, if I’m honest.

WCEU23 – Day 2

My second day of the main conference part of WordCamp Europe 2023 was hampered slightly by a late start on my part.

Dan, sweating, with an actively-used dancefloor in the background. — I can’t say for certain why I woke up mildly hungover and with sore knees, but I make an educated guess that it might be related to the Pride party I found myself at last night.

Still, I managed to get to all the things I’d earmarked for my attention, including:

Gutenberg collaborative editing experience

I’m sure I can’t be the only person who’s been asked “why can’t the (or ‘shouldn’t the’) WordPress post editor let multiple people edit post at the same time”. Often, people will compare it to e.g. Google Docs.

A man in a blue shirt stands on a large stage. — I can’t begin to speculate how often people must ask this supposedly-trivial question of Dawid Urbański, possibly the world’s expert on this very question.

Dawid summarised the challenging issues in any effort to implement this much-desired feature. Some of them are examples of those unsolved problems that keep rearing their heads in computer science, like the two generals’ problem, but even the solvable problems are difficult: How does one handle asynchronous (non-idempotent) commutative operations? How is the order of disparate actions determined? Which node is the source of truth? If a server is used, where is that server (with a nod to quite how awful the experience of implementing a Websockets server in PHP can be…)? And so on…

Slide showing a timeline in which two participants A and B send an update to one another, but neither can be sure whose update was made first. — Slides showing simplified timelines of parties communicating with one another in ambigous ways

I really appreciated Dawid’s reference to the various bits of academic literature that’s appeared over the last four decades (!) about how these problems might be solved. It’s a strong reminder that these things we take for granted in live-updating multi-user web applications are not trivial and every question you can answer raises more questions.

There’s some great early proof-of-concepts, so we’re “getting there”, and it’s an exciting time. Personally, I love the idea of the benefits this could provide for offline editing (perhaps just because I’m still a huge fan of a well-made PWA!).

The future of work is open

James Giroux’s goal: that we all become more curious about and more invested in our team’s experiences, from a humanistic standpoint. His experience of companies with organic growth of software companies is very, very familiar: you make a thing and give it away, then you need more people, then you’ve somehow got a company and it’s all because you just had an idea once. Sounds like Three Rings!

A man in a white t-shirt and dark jacket stands on a stage in front of a screen; the bottom line of the words on the screen can be seen to read "Work is Open". — Financial success is not team success, as Twitter shows, with their current unsustainable and unhappy developer culture, James reminds us.

James was particularly keen to share with us the results of his Team Experience Index research, and I agree that some of the result are especially exciting, in particularly the willingness of underrepresented groups, especially women, to enagage with the survey: this provides hugely valuable data about the health of teams working in the WordPress space.

A slide showing demographic details: 28% say that they represent a historically underrepresented group, 55% are in North America, 67% provided a gender that was not "male". — The statistician in me immediately wanted to know how the non-response rate to these (optional) questions varied relative to one another (if they’re very different, putting these pie charts alongside one another could be disingenuous!), but I’m tentatively excited by the diversity represented anyway.

“We have this project that we work with and contribute to, that we love,” says James, in an attempt to explain the highly-positive feedback that his survey respondents gave when asked questions about the authenticity of their purpose and satisfaction in their role.

A man on a stage stands in front of a slide listing strengths and opportunities resulting from the survey. — Again, my inner statistician wants to chirp up about the *lack of a control group*. The data from the survey may well help companies working within the WordPress ecosystem to identify things we’re doing well and opportunities for growth, but it’d also be cool to compare these metrics to those in companies *outside* of the WordPress world!

So, what do we do with these findings? How do WordPress-ey companies improve? James recommends that we:

Get better are showing what recognition, celebration, and career growth looks like,
Improve support and training for team leaders to provide them with the tools to succeed and inspire, and
Bridge the gap between leadership and team members with transparent, open dialogue.

Good tips, there.

The Big Photo

A WordCamp tradition is to try to squeeze every willing participant into a photo. Clearly with the size that these events are, nowadays, this requires some wrangling (and, in this case, the photographers standing atop the roof of a nearby building to get everybody into frame).

An enormous crowd shuffles tightly into a courtyard. A trio of blue-shirted photographers stands atop a building opposite them. — Like herding cats, trying to get several hundred people to line up where you want them for a photograph is an exercise in patience.

I’ll have to keep an eye out for the final picture and see if I can find myself in it.

What is new in CSS?

I always find that learning about bleeding edge CSS techniques makes me feel excited and optimistic, perhaps because CSS lends itself so well towards a progressive enhancement approach to development: often, you can start using a new technique today and it’ll only benefit, say, people using a beta version of a particular browser (and perhaps only if they opt-in to the applicable feature flag). But if you’ve designed your site right then the lack of this feature won’t impact anybody else, and eventually the feature will (hopefully) trickle-down into almost everybody’s Web experience.

Anyway, that’s what Fellyph Cintra says too, but he adds that possibly we’ve still not grown out of thinking that browsers take a long time between versions. 5 years passed between the release of Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7, for example! But nowadays most browsers are evergreen with releases each month! (Assuming we quietly ignore that Apple don’t sent new versions of Safari to old verisons of MacOS, continuing to exacerbate a problem that we used to see with Internet Explorer on Windows, ahem.)

A man on a stage with his arm out in greeting to the crowd in front of him. — Fellyph told us about how he introduced `<dialog>` to his team and they responded with skepticism that they’d be able to use it within the next 5 years. But in fact it’s already stable in every major browser.

An important new development may come from Baseline, a project to establish a metric of what you can reliably use on the Web today. So a bit like Can I Use, I guess, but taken from the opposite direction: starting from the browsers and listing the features, rather than the other way around.

Anyway, Fellyph went on to share some exciting new ideas that we should be using, like:

object-fit and object-position, which can make the contents of any container “act like” a background
aspect-ratio, which I’m already using and I love, but I enjoyed how Fellyph suggested combining the two to crop images to a fluid container on the client side
scroll-behavior: smooth, which I’ve used before; it’s pretty good
clamp, which I use… but I’m still not sure I fully grok it: I always have to load some documentation with examples when I use it
@container queries, which can apply e.g. (max-width: ...) rules to things other than the viewport, which I’ve not found a need for yet but I can see the value of it
@layers, which grant an additional level of importance in the cascade: for example, you might load a framework into a layer (with @import url(...) layer(framework)) which is defined as a lower-priority than your override layer, meaning you won’t have to start slapping !important all over the shop
@media (400px <= width <= 600px)-style media queries, which are much easier to understand than min-width: if you’re used to thinking in a more-procedural programming language (I assume they work in container queries too!)

Fellyph Cintra stands in front of a large screen showing a slide that introduces himself to his audience: "Front-end Lead at Digitale Methode & Google Developer Expert @fellyph" — …

It’s also worth remembering:

@supports, which is badass and I love and use it already (it was especially useful as display: grid began to roll out and I wanted to start using it but needed to use a fallback method for browsers that didn’t support it yet
:has(), which I’ve long thought is game-changing: styling something based on what it contains is magical; not really suitable for mainstream use yet without Firefox support, though (it’s still behind a feature flag)! Fellyph sold me on the benefit of :not(:has(...)), though!
Nesting, which again doesn’t have Firefox support yet but provides SCSS-like nesting in CSS, which is awesome
Scroll-driven animations, which can e.g. do parallax effects without JavaScript (right now it’s Canary only, mind…), using e.g. animation-timeline: and animation-range: to specify that it’s the scroll position within the document that provides the timeline for the animation

And keeping an eye on upcoming things like text-balanced (which I’m already excited by), popover, selectmenu, view transitions (which I’ve been experimenting with because they’re cool), and scoped style.

Fellyph was at least as inspiring as I’d hoped.

Stop blocking my thread

For my second workshop, I joined Google’s Adam Silverstein to watch him dissect a few participants’ websites performance using Core Web Vitals as a metric. I think I already know the basics of Core Web Vitals, but when it comes to improving my score (especially on work-related sites with unpleasant reliance on heavyweight frameworks like React, in my experience).

A man stands at a podium. — In an early joke, Adam pointed out that you can reduce JavaScript thread blocking by removing JavaScript from your site. A lot of people laughed, but frankly I think it’s a great idea.

We talked a lot about render blocking (thanks to JS and CSS in the <head>), thread blocking (by scripts, especially those reacting to user input), TTFB (relating to actual network and server performance, or at least server-side processing), TBT (the time between FCP and TTI), and the upcoming change to measure INP rather than FID. That’s a lot of acronyms.

The short of it is that there are three pillars to Core Web Vitals: loading (how long until the page renders), interactivity (how long until the page responds to user interaction), and stability (how long it takes for the page to cease layout shifts as a result of post-load scripts and stylesheets). I was pleased that Adam acknowledged the major limitation of lab testing resulting from developers often using superior hardware and Internet connections to typical users, and how if you’re serious about performance metrics you’ll want to collect RUM data.

Adam explaining Render-Blocking CSS. — The fastest way to improve rendering performance is to put fewer obstacles in the way of rendering.

I came away with a few personalised tips, but they’re not much use for your site: I paid attention to the things that’ll be helpful for the sites I look after. But I’ll be taking note of his test pages so I can play with some of the tools he demonstrated later on.

Variations on a theme: 20 years of WordPress

I couldn’t liveblog this because I spent too much of the session applauding. A few highlights from memory:

Phase 2 (of 4) of Gutenberg is basically complete, which is cool. Some back-and-forth about the importance of phase 4 (bringing better multilingual support to WordPress) and how it feels like it’s a long way away.
Lots of plugging for Five for the Future, which I can get behind.
In the same vein as his 2016 statement that WordPress developers should “learn JavaScript deeply”, Matt leant somewhat into the idea that from today they should “watch AI carefully”; I’m not 100% convinced, but it’s not been stopping me from getting involved with a diversity of AI experiments (including some WordPress-related ones) anyway.
Musings about our community being a major part of why WordPress succeeded (and continues to thrive) unlike some other open source projects of its era. I agree that’s a factor, but I suspect that being in the right place at the right time was also important. Perhaps more on that another time.
Announcement of the next WordCamp Europe location.

Here’s looking forward to WordCamp Europe 2024 in Turin!

Dan Q found GC5KBK3 ISAP: Omonia

This checkin to GC5KBK3 ISAP: Omonia reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Found! Took a bit of a search, because I had looked at the hint image which shows several trees at the GZ that are no longer there, so I was left thinking I must be in the wrong place for a while! TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

WCEU23 – Day 1

The first “full” day of WordCamp Europe 2023 (which kicked-off at Contributor Day) was busy and intense, but I loved it.

This post is basically a live-blog of everything I got up to, and it’s mostly for my own benefit/notetaking. If you don’t read it, nobody will blame you.

Seen from behind, a very long queue runs through a conference centre. — Six minutes after workshop registration opened its queue snaked throughout an entire floor of the conference centre.

Here’s what I got up to:

10 things that all WordPress plugin developers should avoid

David Artiss took the courageous step of installing 36 popular plugins onto a fresh WordPress site and was, unsurprisingly, immediately bombarded by a billion banners on his dashboard. Some were merely unhelpful (“don’t forget to add your API key”), others were annoying (“thanks for installing our plugin”), and plenty more were commercial advertisements (“get the premium version”) despite the fact that WordPress.org guidelines recommend against this. It’s no surprise that this kind of “aggressive promotion” is the single biggest annoyance that people reported when David asked around on social media.

Similarly, plugins which attempt to break the standard WordPress look-and-feel by e.g. hoisting themselves to the top of the menu, showing admin popovers, putting settings sections in places other than the settings submenu, and so on are a huge annoyance to everybody. I get sufficiently frustrated by these common antifeatures of plugins I use that I actually maintain a plugin for my own use that “fixes” the ones that aggrivate me the most!

David raised lots of other common gripes with WordPress plugins, too: data validation failures, leaving content behind after uninstallation (and “deactivation surveys”, ugh!), and a failure to account for accessibility.

David’s promised to put his slides online, plus to write articles about everything that came up in his Q&A.

I’m unconvinced that we can rely on plugin developers to independently fix the kinds of problems that come high on David’s list. I wonder if there’s mileage in WordPress Core reimplementing the way that the main navigation menu works such that all items in it can be (easily) re-arranged by users to their own preference? This would undermine the perceived value to plugin developers of “hoisting” their own to the top by allowing users to counteract it, and would provide a valuable feature to allow site admins to streamline their workflow: use WooCommerce but only in a way that’s secondary to your blog? Move “Products” below “Posts”! Etc.

Screenshot showing a WordPress admin interface writing this blog post, with the stage in the background. — Why yes, I’m liveblogging this. And yes, I’m not using Gutenberg yet (that’s a whole other story…)

Where did we come from?

Aaron Reimann from ClockworkWP gave us a tour of how WordPress has changed over the course of its 20-year history, starting even slightly before I started using WordPress; my blog (previously powered by some hacky PHP, previouslier powered by some hackier Perl, previousliest written in static HTML) switched to WordPress in 2004, when it hit version 1.2, so it was fun to get the opportunity to see some even older versions illustrated.

A WordPress site, circa 2004, simulated in a virtual machine. — A WordPress site from 2004 would, of course, still be perfectly usable today. How many JS-heavy/API-driven websites of today do you reckon will still function in 20 years time?

It was great to be reminded how far the Core code has come over that time. Early versions of WordPress – as was common among PHP applications at the time! – had very few files and each could reliably be expected to be a stack of SQL, wrapped in a stack of code, wrapped in what’s otherwise a HTML file: no modularity!

A man wearing a flat cap strides across a stage. — Aaron’s passion for this kind of digital archaeology really shows. I dig it.

There were very few surprises for me in this talk, as you might expect for such an “old hand”, but I really enjoyed the nostalgia of exploring WordPress history through his eyes.

I enjoyed putting him on the spot with a “spicy” question at the end of his talk, by asking him if, alongside everything we’ve gained over the years, whether there’s anything we lost along the way. He answered well, pointing out that the somewhat bloated stack of plugins that are commonplace on big sites nowadays and the ease with which admins can just “click and install” more of them. I agree with him, although personally I miss built-in XFN support…

If you’d have told me in advance that hugging a Wapuu would have been a highlight of the day… yeah, that wouldn’t have been a surprise!

Networking And All That

There’s a lot of exhibitors with stands, but I tried to do a circuit or so and pay attention at least to those whose owners I’ve come into contact with in a professional capacity. Many developers who make extensions for WooCommerce, of course, sell those extensions through WooCommerce.com, which means they come into routine direct contact with my code (and it can mean that when their extension’s been initially rejected by our security scanners or linters, it’s me their developers first want to curse!).

A WordCamp Europe Athens 2023 lanyard and name badge for Dan Q, Attendee, onto which a "Woo" sticker has been affixed. — After a while, to spare some of that awkward exchange where somebody tries to sell me their product before I explain that I *already sell their product for them*, I slapped a “Woo” sticker on my lanyard.

It’s been great to connect with people using WordPress to power the Web in a whole variety of different contexts, but it somehow still feels strange to me that WordPress has such a commercial following! Even speaking as somebody who’s made their living at least partially out of WordPress for the last decade plus, it still feels to me like its greatest value comes from its use for personal publishing.

The feel of a WordCamp with its big shiny sponsors is enormously different from, say, the intimacy and individuality of a Homebrew Website Club meeting, and I think that’s something I still need to come to terms with. WordPress’s success story comes from many different causes, but perhaps chief among them is the fact that it’s versatile enough to power the website of a government, multinational, or household-name brand… but also to run the smallest personal indie blog. I struggle to comprehend that, even with my background.

(Side note, Sophie Koonin says that building a personal website is a radical act in 2023, and I absolutely agree.)

A "Woo" booth, staffed with a variety of people, with Dan at the centre. — My division of Automattic had a presence, of course.

I was proud of my colleagues for the “gimmick” they were using to attract people to the Woo stand: you could pick up a “credit card” and use it to make a purchase (of Greek olive oil) using a website, see your order appear on the app at the backend in real-time, and then receive your purchase as a giveaway. The “credit card” doubles as a business card from the stand, the olive oil is a real product from a real, local producer (who really uses WooCommerce to sell online!), and when you provide an email address at the checkout you can opt-in to being contacted by the team afterwards. That’s some good joined-up thinking by my buddies in marketing!

WordPress extended: build unique websites on top of WP

Petya Petkova observed that it’s commonplace to take the easy approach and make a website look like… well, every other website. “Web deja-vu” is a real thing, and it’s fed not only by the ebbs and flows of trends in web design but by the proliferation of indistinct themes that people just install-and-use.

A woman with long hair, wearing a green t-shirt, stands before a screen on a stage. — How can we break free from web deja-vu, asks Petya. It almost makes me sad that her slides had been coalesced into the conference’s slidedeck design rather than being her own… although on second though maybe that just helps enhance the point!

Choice of colours and typography can be used to tell a story, to instil a feeling, to encourage engagement. Scrolling can be used as a metaphor for storytelling (“scrolly-telling”, Petya calls it). Animation flow can be used to direct a user’s attention and drive focus and encourage interaction.

A lot of the technical concepts she demonstrated – parts of a page that scroll at different speeds, typography that shifts or changes, videos used in a subtle way to accentuate other content, etc. – can be implemented in the frontend with WebGL, Three.js and the like. Petya observes that moving this kind of content interactivity into the frontend can produce an illusion of a performance improvement, which is an argument I’ve heard before, but personally I think it’s only valuable if it’s built as a progressive enhancement: otherwise, you’re always at risk that your site won’t look like you’d hope.

I note, for example, that Petya’s agency’s site shows only an “endless spinner” when viewed in my browser (which blocks the code.jQuery CDN by default, unless allowlisted for specific sites). All of the content is there, on the page, if you View Source, but it’s completely invisible if an external JavaScript fails to load. That doesn’t just happen when weirdos like me disable JavaScript in their browsers: it can happen if the browser interacts badly with the script, or if the user’s Internet connection is ropey, or a malware scanner misfires, or if government censorship blocks the CDN, or in any number of other conditions.

So yeah: uniqueness and creativity are great, and I like what she’s proposing, but not the way she goes about it. The first person to ask a question wisely brought up accessibility, and Petya answered well that accessibility technologies can bridge the gap, but I’d counter that it’s preferable to build accessible in the first instance: if you have to use an aria- attribute it’s a good sign that you probably already did something wrong (not always, but it’s certainly a pointer that you ought to take a step back and check!).

Several other good questions and great answers followed: about how to showcase a preliminary design when they design is dependent upon animation and interactivity (which I’ve witnessed before!), on the value of server-side rendering of components, and about how to optimise for smaller screens. Petya clearly knows her stuff in all of these areas and had confident responses.

State of WordPress security – insights from 2022

Oliver Sild is the kind of self-taught hacker, security nerd, and community builder that I love, so I wasn’t going to miss his talk.

A man in a literal black hat stands in the centre of a large theatre stage. — The number of security vulnerability reports in the WordPress ecosystem is up +328%, Oliver opened. But the bugs being reported are increasingly *old*, so we’re not talking about *new issues being created*. And only 0.3% of bugs were in WordPress Core (and were patched before they were exploitable).

It’s good news in general in WordPress Security-land… but CSRF is on the up-and-up (overtaking XSS) in the plugin space. That, and all the broken access control we see in the admin area, are things I’ll be keeping in mind next time I’m arguing with a vendor about the importance of using nonces and security checks in their extension (I have this battle from time to time!).

But an interesting development is the growth of the supply chains in the WordPress plugin ecosystem. Nowadays a plugin might depend upon another plugin which might depend upon a library… and a patch applied to the latter of those might take time to be propagated through the chain, providing attackers with a growing window of opportunity.

Sankey chart showing 1160 submitted bugs being separated into pending, accepted, invalid, and (eventually) patched. 26% of critical bugs in 2022 received no timely patch. — I love a good Sankey chart. Even when it says scary things.

A worrying thought is that while plugin directory administrators will pull and remove plugins that have longstanding unactioned security issues. But that doesn’t help the sites that already have that plugin installed and are still using it! There’s a proposal to allow WordPress to notify admins if a plugin used on a site has been dropped for security reasons, but it was opened 9 years ago and hasn’t seen any real movement, soo…

I like that Oliver plugged for security researchers being acknowledged as equal contributors to developers on your software. But then, I would say that, as somebody who breaks into things once in a while and then tells the affected parties how to fix the problem that allowed me to do so! He also provided a whole wealth of tips for site owners and agencies to try to keep their sites safe, but little that I wasn’t aware of already.

A large audience of a few hundred people, seen from above, facing left. — Still, good to see this talk get as good an audience as it did, given the importance of the topic!

It was about this point in the day, glancing at my schedule and realising that at any given time there were up to four other sessions running simultaneously, that I really got a feel for the scale of this conference. Awesome. Meanwhile, Oliver was fielding the question that I’m sure everybody was thinking: with Gutenberg blocks powered by JavaScript that are often backed by a supply-chain of the usual billion-or-so files you find in your .node_modules directory, isn’t the risk of supply chain attacks increasing?

Spoiler: yes. Did you notice earlier in this post I mentioned that I don’t use Gutenberg on this site yet?

Animation showing Dan, wearing a pilot's hat, surrounded by cotton wool clouds, as the camera pans back and forth. — When the Jetpack team told me that they’ve been improving their cloud offering, this wasn’t what I expected.

Typographic readability in theme design & development

My first “workshop” was run by Giulia Laco, on the topic of readable content and design.

A title slide encourages designers to sit on the left (to the right of the speaker), developers to the right (on her left), and "no-coders" in the centre. — Designers to the left of me, coders to the right: here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

Giulia began by reminding us how short the attention span of Web readers is, and how important the right typographic choices are in ensuring that people actually read your content. I fully get this – I think that very few people will have the attention span to read this part of this very blog post, for example! – but I loved that she hammered the point home by presenting every slide of her presentation twice (or more), “improving” the typographic choices as she went along: an excellent and memorable quirk.

Our capacity to read and comprehend a text is affected by a combination of common (distance, lighting, environment, concentration, mood, etc.), personal (age, proficiency, motiviation, accessibility requirements, etc.), and typographic (face, style, size, line length and spacing, contrast, width, rhythm etc.) factors. To explore the impact of the typographic factors, the group dived into a pre-prepared Codepen and a shared Figma diagram. (I immediately had a TIL moment over the font-synthesis: CSS property!)

A presentation of the typography playground, in which the font is being changed. — I appreciated that Giulia stressed the importance of a fallback font. Just like the CDN issues I described above while talking about JavaScript dependencies, not specifying a fallback font puts your design at the mercy of the browser’s defaults. We don’t like to think about what happens when websites *partially fail*, but they do, and we should.

Things get interesting at the intersection of readability and accessibility. For example, WCAG accessibility requirements demand that you don’t use images of text (we used to do this a lot back before we could reliably use fonts on the web, and before we could easily have background images on e.g. buttons for navigation). But this accessibility requirement also aids screen readability when accounting for e.g. “retina” screens with virtual pixel ratios.

Slide showing a physical pixel and a "virtual pixel" representing a real pixel of a different size. — Do you remember when a pixel was the size of a pixel? Those days are long gone. True story.

Giulia provided a great explanation of why we may well think in pixels (as developers or digital designers) but we’re unlikely to use them everywhere: I’d internalised this lesson long ago but I appreciated a well-explained justification. The short of it is: screen zoom (that fancy zoom feature you use in your browser all the time, especially on mobile) and text zoom (the one you probably don’t use, or don’t use so much) are different things, and setting a pixel-based font size in the root node wrecks the latter, forcing some people with accessibility needs to use the former, which is likely to result in vertical scrolling. Boo!

I also enjoyed seeing this demo of how the different hyphenation-points in different languages (because of syllable stress) can impact on your wrapping points/line lengths when content is translated. This can affect any website, of course, because any website can be the target of automatic translation.

Plus, Giulia’s thoughts on the value of serifed fonts (even on digital displays) for improving typographic readability of the letters d, b, p and q which are often mirror- or rotationally-symmetric to one another in sans-serif fonts. It’s amazing to have something – in this case, a psychological letter transposition – pointed out that I’ve experienced but never pinned down the reason for, before. Neat!

It was a shame that this workshop took place late in the day, because many of the participants (including me) seemed to have flagging energy levels!

Altogether a great (but intense) day. Boggles my mind that there’s another one like it tomorrow.

WCEU23 – Contributor Day

Among the many perks of working for a company with a history so tightly-intertwined with that of the open-source WordPress project is that license to attend WordCamps – the biggest WordPress conferences – is basically a given.

Dan, wearing an Automattic "Let's make the Web a better place" t-shirt, stands in front of a banner welcoming attendees to WordCamp Europe Athens 2023. — So yeah, right now I’m in Athens for WordCamp Europe 2023.

It’s frankly a wonder that this is, somehow, my first WordCamp. As well as using it¹ and developing atop it², of course, I’ve been contributing to WordPress since 2004 (albeit only in a tiny way, and not at all for most of the last decade!).

A table placeholder labelled "WP-CLI". It and s handful of Coke cans and disposable coffee cups are picked-out in colour on an otherwise monochrome and blurred picture. — If you already know what WP-CLI is… let’s be friends.

Today is Contributor Day, a pre-conference day in which folks new and old get together in person to hack on WordPress and WordPress-adjacent projects. So I met up with Cem, my Level 4 Dragonslayer friend, and we took an ultra-brief induction into WP-CLI³ before diving in to try to help write some code.

Dan takes a selfie from a round table covered in laptops, with people hacking at them. — Contributor Days are about many things, but perhaps their biggest value comes from lowering the barrier to becoming a *new* contributor to an open-source project by sitting you right next to somebody who already knows it well.

So today, as well as meeting some awesome folks, I got to write an overly-verbose justification for a bug report being invalid and implement my first PR for WP-CLI: a bugfix for a strange quirk in output formatting.

Screenshot showing a user running `wp plugin update --all --no-color` but the output putting the word "Success" in green. — The bug I fixed is slightly hard to describe (and even harder to explain why it *matters*), but here’s a summary: when you run a WP-CLI command that first displays a table and then the result, the result is likely to always appear in colour even if you specify `--no-color`.

I hope to be able to continue contributing to WP-CLI. I learned a lot about it today, and while I don’t use it as much as I used to in my multisite-management days, I still really respect its power as a tool.

MacBook showing an Automattic "Work For Us" web page, alongside a bottle of Corona Extra. A rooftop terrace garden and swimming pool can be seen in the background. — Did I mention lately how awesome my employers are? I promise my blog’s not *always* gonna be me shilling for them… but today it is.

Footnotes

¹ Even with the monumental stack of custom code woven into DanQ.me, a keen eye will probably spot that it’s WordPress-powered.

² Perhaps my proudest “built on WordPress” moment was my original implementation of OpenID for WordPress, back in 2005, which is completely obsolete now. But I’ve done plenty of other things, both useful (like the multisite installation used by the University of Oxford) and pointless (like making WordPress a CMS for Gemini, Gopher, and Finger) too over the last 20 years.

³ WP-CLI is… it’s like Drush but for WordPress, if that makes sense to you? If not: it’s a multifaceted command-line tool for installing, configuring, maintaining, and managing WordPress installations, and I’ve been in love with it for years.

Dan Q found GC1B0P5 The Runner

This checkin to GC1B0P5 The Runner reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

What a great statue! Cache was very easy to find; despite its camo it was very visible as I walked along the adjacent path. Thanks for bringing me out of my way on my walk from my hotel to the conference I’m attending, and TFTC. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

Dan Q found GC2K167 Petraki Monastery – NIMTS

This checkin to GC2K167 Petraki Monastery - NIMTS reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF once I found the right hiding place! TFTC, and for the excuse to divert my morning walk this way. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

Dan Q found GC97N64 Under the Bridge

This checkin to GC97N64 Under the Bridge reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Walking from my hotel to the site of a conference I’m attending, this morning, I stopped to find this cache. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to spot this sneaky little container! Greetings from Oxford, UK, and TFTC!

Dan Q found GC9WD6N Peter’s

This checkin to GC9WD6N Peter's reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Saw the notification when this cache appeared near my house, which would normally be the point at which a race was kicked off between me and Go Catch for the FTF, before he inevitably got there first!

But this time around I was overseas when the listing went live and only found time to cycle out here from Stanton Harcourt this evening, after work. I’d visited the church here once before in service of the nearby multi, but it was nice to see a different side of it as well as an excellent hiding place.

TFTC!

Have Fun with Missions, Visions, and Values

I just spent a lightweight week in Rome with fellow members of Automattic‘s Team Fire.

Among our goals for the week was an attempt to strengthen the definition of who are team are, what we work on, and how and why we do so. That’s basically a team-level identity, mission, vision, and values, right?

In front of the Colosseum in Rome, Dan - wearing a rainbow-striped bandana atop which his sunglasses are perched - takes a selfie. Behind him stand a man with dark hair and a closely-trimmed beard wearing a purple "woo" t-shirt, a woman with long brown hair wearing beads and a multicoloured dress, a man wearing spectacles and a dark t-shirt on which the number "23" can be made out, and a man in sunglasses with a ginger beard, wearing an open blue shirt. — We were missing two members of our team, but one was able to remote-in (the other’s on parental leave!).

Fellow Automattician Ben Dwyer recently wrote about his experience of using a deck of Dixit cards to help his team refine their values in a fun and engaging way. I own a Dixit set, so we decided to give it a go too.

A deck of Dixit cards, bound by a twisted elastic band, sits on a flight itinerary for the journey "LGW to FCO" taking place on May 21, 2023 and costing $367.60. — The cards sat on my ‘plane tickets for a fortnight because it was just about the only way I’d remember to pack them.

Normally when you play Dixit, you select a card from your hand – each shows a unique piece of artwork – and try to describe it in a way that’s precise enough that some of the other players will later be able to pick it out of a line-up, but ambiguous enough that not all the other players will. It’s a delicate balancing act. Even when our old Geek Night was in full swing we didn’t used to play it often because our well-established group’s cornucopia of in-jokes and references made it trivially easy to “target” your descriptions at specific players¹, but it’s still a solid icebreaker activity.

Perhaps it was the fantasy artwork that inspired us or maybe it just says something about how my team sees themselves, but what we came up with had a certain… swords-and-sorcery… even Dungeons & Dragons… feel to it.

Ou team’s new identity isn’t finalised, but I love the fact that we’ve been able to inject a bit of fun and whimsy into it. At our last draft, my team looks to be defined as comprising:

Gareth, level 6² Pathfinder, leading the way through the wilds
Bero, Level 5 Battlesmith, currently lost in the void
Dan (me!), Level 5 Arcane Trickster, breaking locks and stealing treasure
Cem, Level 4 Dragonslayer, smashing doors and bugs alike
Lae, Level 7 Pirate, seabound rogue with eyes on the horizon
Kyle, Level 5 Apprentice Bard, master of words and magic
Simran, Level 6 Apprentice Code Witch, weaving spells from nature

I think that’s pretty awesome.

Footnotes

¹ Also: I don’t own any of the expansion packs and playing with the same cards over and over again gets a bit samey.

² The “levels” are simply the number of years each teammate has been an Automattician, plus one.

Dan Q found GC7FB9H From Canterbury to the cache

This checkin to GC7FB9H From Canterbury to the cache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Well that was quite the adventure!

The first wayoint is right across the road from where some work colleagues and I are staying for an “away week”. I decided to dash out during a break in the weather to try and solve this multi between meetings. But I was quickly confused because… this isn’t the way I was taught to do Roman numerals. I’d always been told that you should never have four of the same letter in a row, e.g. you should say XIV, not XIIII. Once I’d worked out what I was doing wrong, though, I was okay!

The second and third waypoints had me braving some frankly scary roads. The drivers here just don’t seem to stop unless you’re super assertive when you step out!

Once I had the final numbers and ran it through geochecker I realised that the cache must be very close to where I’d had lunch earlier today! Once I got there it took me a while to get to the right floor, after which the hint made things pretty obvious.

Great trail, really loved it. And just barely made it back before the rain really started hammering down. TFTC, FP awarded, and greetings from Oxford, UK!

Dan Q found GC9QCKH When in Rome live as the Romans do (bb Tribute 05)

This checkin to GC9QCKH When in Rome live as the Romans do (bb Tribute 05) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Took until the fourth hiding place before I found the cache. Out for a walk with work colleagues on the way to dinner. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

Travelling light

Now that travel for work is back on the menu, I’ve been trying to upgrade my “pack light” game.

I’ve been inspired in part by Beau, who I first met during my trip to South Africa in 2019 during my Automattic onboarding. Beau travelled from the US for a two week jaunt with nothing but hand luggage, and it blew my mind.

Gotta flight? Pack light, pack tight. That’s right! Corporate branding is just a bonus.

For my trip to Vienna earlier this year for a divisional meetup, I got by with just a backpack and a laptop bag. Right now, I’m waiting to fly to Rome for a week, and I’ve ditched the laptop bag in favour of just a single carry-on backpack. About 7kg of luggage, and well within the overhead locker size limit.

I’m absolutely sold on this approach. I get to:

walk past the queues for luggage drop (having checked-in online),
keep the entirety of my luggage with me at all times (which ensures it goes where I do),
breeze through security¹, thanks to smart packing²
walk right out of the airport at the other end without having to wait for the flingers to finish smashing everybody’s luggage into the carousels.

Minimalist carbon fibre wallet, balanced on two fingertips, with parts of a Halifax Mastercard credit card showing from behind an elasticated band. — I’ve been working on simplifying my everyday carry, too. My wallet is the Carbon Fibre Liquid Wallet, which is about the size of a deck of playing cards (something I also often carry!) and holds a handful of cards, a bundle of cash, a bottle opener, *and* all my regular keys. The hook on the end is for attaching the pendrive with my password safe for travel.

As somebody who’s travelled “heavy” for most of my life – and especially since the children came along – it’s liberating to migrate to a “pick up a bag and go” mindset. To begin with, the nagging thought that I must’ve forgotten something essential was challenging, but I think I’ve gotten past that stage now.

Travelling light feels like carefree: like being a kid again, when all you needed was the back on your back and you were ready for an adventure. Once again, I’ve got a bag on my back³ and I know that everything I need for an adventure is right here with me⁴.

Footnotes

¹ If you’ve travelled with me before, you might have noticed that I sometimes have trouble at borders on account of my damn stupid name, as predicted by the Passport Office. I’ve since learned all the requisite tricks to sidestep these problems, but that’s probably worthy of a post in its own right.

² A little smart packing goes a long way. In the photo above, you might see my pre-prepared liquids bag in a side pocket, my laptop slides right out for separate scanning, my wallet and phone just dump out of my pockets, and I’m done.

³ I don’t really have a bag on my back right now. I’m sat in a depature lounge at Gatwick Airport. But you get the idea.

⁴ Do I really have everything I need? I’ve not brought a waterproof coat and, looking at the weather forecast at my destination, this might have been a mistake. But worst case I can buy a cheap poncho at the other end. That’s the kind of freedom that being an adult gets you, replacing the childlike freedom to get soaked and not care.

Normal for Children

Lacking a basis for comparison, children accept their particular upbringing as normal and representative.

Kit was telling me about how his daughter considers it absolutely normal to live in a house full of insectivorous plants¹, and it got me thinking about our kids, and then about myself:

I remember once overhearing our eldest, then at nursery, talking to her friend. Our kid had mentioned doing something with her “mummy, daddy, and Uncle Dan” and was incredulous that her friend didn’t have an Uncle Dan that they lived with! Isn’t having three parents… just what a family looks like?

Dan, wearing a black jumper, sits on a green chair in a brightly-decorated bedroom. On his chest, a 2-year-old girl has fallen asleep, clutching a woolen yellow blanket and with her thumb in her mouth. — You don’t have an Uncle Dan? Then where do you nap‽

By the time she was at primary school, she’d learned that her family wasn’t the same shape as most other families, and she could code-switch with incredible ease. While picking her up from school, I overheard her talking to a friend about a fair that was coming to town. She told the friend that she’d “ask her dad if she could go”, then turned to me and said “Uncle Dan: can we go to the fair?”; when I replied in the affirmitive, she turned back and said “my dad says it’s okay”. By the age of 5 she was perfectly capable of translating on-the-fly² in order to simultaneously carry out intelligble conversations with her family and with her friends. Magical.

When I started driving, and in particular my first few times on multi-lane carriageways, something felt “off” and it took me a little while to work out what it was. It turns out that I’d internalised a particular part of the motorway journey experience from years of riding in cars driven by my father, who was an unrepentant³ and perpetual breaker of speed limits.⁴ I’d come to associate motorway driving with overtaking others, but almost never being overtaken, but that wasn’t what I saw when I drove for myself.⁵ It took a little thinking before I realised the cause of this false picture of “what driving looks like”.

A boxy 1979 white Ford car, number plate DSS 657T with a badly dented and somewhat corroded front wheel arch on the drivers' side, sits empty and parked at the side of an otherwise empty asphalt strreet. In the background, under grey skies, a city skyline can be made out with houses, tower blocks, and a church steeple, on the other side of an arched river bridge. The leaves are early-autumn coloured: mostly greem, but with some brown appearing and a handful of bare branches exposed. — How my dad ever *managed* to speed in this old rustbucket I’ll never know.

The thing is: you only ever notice the “this is normal” definitions that you’ve internalised… when they’re challenged!

It follows that there are things you learned from the quirks of your upbringing that you still think of as normal. There might even be things you’ll never un-learn. And you’ll never know how many false-normals you still carry around with you, or whether you’ve ever found them all, exept to say that you probably haven’t yet.

A small child, sitting on the floor, uses a mobile phone to watch a cartoon of two people struggling to pull a fishing rod. A feminine hand with brown-painted nails and rings on two fingers reaches in to offer the child a minature model of a human brain. — I wanted a stock image that expressed the concept of how children conceptualise ideas in their mind, but I ended up with this picture of a women offering her kid a tiny human brain in exchange for her mobile phone back. That’s a normal thing that all families do, right?

It’s amazing and weird to think that there might be objective truths you’re perpetually unable to see as a restult of how, or where, or by whom you were brought up, or by what your school or community was like, or by the things you’ve witnessed or experienced over your life. I guess that all we can all do is keep questioning everything, and work to help the next generation see what’s unusual and uncommon in their own lives.

Footnotes

¹ It’s a whole thing. If you know Kit, you’re probably completely unsurprised, but spare a thought for the poor randoms who sometimes turn up and read my blog.

² Fully billingual children who typically speak a different language at home than they do at school do this too, and it’s even-more amazing to watch.

³ I can’t recall whether his license was confiscated on two or three separate ocassions, in the end, but it was definitely more than one. Having a six month period where you and your siblings have to help collect the weekly shop from the supermarket by loading up your bikes with shopping bags is a totally normal part of everybody’s upbringing, isn’t it?

⁴ Virtually all of my experience as a car passenger other than with my dad was in Wales, where narrow windy roads mean that once you get stuck behind something, that’s how you’re going to be spending your day.

⁵ Unlike my father, I virtually never break the speed limit, to such an extent that when I got a speeding ticket the other year (I’d gone from a 70 into a 50 zone and re-set the speed limiter accordingly, but didn’t bother to apply the brakes and just coasted down to the new speed… when the police snapped their photo!), Ruth and JTA both independently reacted to the news with great skepticism.

Dan Q found GC8B4CH Is 14 Your Lucky Number Yet?

This checkin to GC8B4CH Is 14 Your Lucky Number Yet? reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Easy find while out for a ride, breaking in my new bike. Great ride, aside from the mayflies, which I must’ve ingested about a million of! As others have observed, the logbook has soaked to the point of disintegration and could do with replacement. Thanks though for a cache I’ve probably driven, walked out cycled past a hundred times before actually stopping to find it.