Dan Q
Think I blew Ruth‘s mind this morning when I set off for a week in Mexico with only a medium-sized, underseat-suitable backpack.
But since working for Automattic five years ago I’ve totally been bitten by the travelling-light bug. Highly recommended!
This week has been a wild ride at Automattic. I’ve shared my take on our recent drama already1.
Off the back of all of this, our CEO Matt Mullenweg realised:
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It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.
So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher.
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HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!
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This was a really bold move, and gave many people I know pause for consideration. “Quit today, and we’ll pay you six months salary,” could be a pretty high-value deal for some people, and it was offered basically without further restriction2.
A 2008 Havard Business Review article (unpaywalled version) talked about a curious business strategy undertaken by shoe company Zappos:
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Every so often, though, I spend time with a company that is so original in its strategy, so determined in its execution, and so transparent in its thinking, that it makes my head spin. Zappos is one of those companies
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It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.
After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!
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I’m sure you can see the parallel. What Zappos do routinely and Automattic did this week have a similar outcome
By reducing – not quite removing – the financial incentive to remain, they aim to filter their employees down to only those whose reason for being there is that they believe in what the company does3. They’re trading money for idealism.
Buried about half way through the Creed is the line I am more motivated by impact than money, which seems quite fitting. Automattic has always been an idealistic company. This filtering effort helps validate that.
The effect of Automattic’s “if you don’t feel aligned with us, we’ll pay you to leave” offer has been significant: around 159 people – 8.4% of the company – resigned this week. At very short notice, dozens of people I know and have worked with… disappeared from my immediate radar. It’s been… a lot.
I chose to stay. I still believe in Automattic’s mission, and I love my work and the people I do it with. But man… it makes you second-guess yourself when people you know, and respect, and love, and agree with on so many things decide to take a deal like this and… quit4.
There’ve been some real heart-in-throat moments. A close colleague of mine started a message in a way that made me briefly panic that this was a goodbye, and it took until half way through that I realised it was the opposite and I was able to start breathing again.
But I’m hopeful and optimistic that we’ll find our feet, rally our teams, win our battles, and redouble our efforts to make the Web a better place, democratise publishing (and eCommerce!), and do it all with a commitment to open source. There’s tears today, but someday there’ll be happiness again.
1 For which the Internet quickly made me regret my choices, delivering a barrage of personal attacks and straw man arguments, but I was grateful for the people who engaged in meaningful discourse.
2 For example, you could even opt to take the deal if you were on a performance improvement plan, or if you were in your first week of work! If use these examples because I’m pretty confident that both of them occurred.
3 Of course, such a strategy can never be 100% effective, because people’s reasons for remaining with an employer are as diverse as people are.
4 Of course their reasons for leaving are as diverse and multifaceted as others’ reasons for staying might be! I’ve a colleague who spent some time mulling it over not because he isn’t happy working here but because he was close to retirement, for example.
Harry Segell’s 1938 play Heaven Can Wait went on to inspire such an extraordinarily long legacy of follow-ups.
I’ve only seen the most-recent few and my experience is that the older iterations are better, so I probably ought to watch Here Comes Mr. Jordan, right?
This morning’s actual breakfast order from the 7-year-old: “A sesame seed bagel with honey, unless there aren’t any sesame seed bagels, in which case a plain bagel with honey on one half and jam on the other half, unless there aren’t any plain bagels, in which case a cinnamon and raisin bagel with JimJams on one half and Biscoff on the other half.”
Some day, this boy will make a great LISP programmer. 😂
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
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Let’s play a little game. 😉
Look at the following list of words and try to find the intruder:
- wp-activate.php
- wp-admin
- wp-blog-header.php
- wp_commentmeta
- wp_comments
- wp-comments-post.php
- wp-config-sample.php
- wp-content
- wp-cron.php
- wp engine
- wp-includes
- wp_jetpack_sync_queue
- wp_links
- wp-links-opml.php
- wp-load.php
- wp-login.php
- wp-mail.php
- wp_options
- wp_postmeta
- wp_posts
- wp-settings.php
- wp-signup.php
- wp_term_relationships
- wp_term_taxonomy
- wp_termmeta
- wp_terms
- wp-trackback.php
- wp_usermeta
- wp_users
What are these words?
Well, all the ones that contain an underscore
_are names of the WordPress core database tables. All the ones that contain a dash-are WordPress core file or folder names. The one with a space is a company name……
A smart (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) observation by my colleague Paolo, there. The rest of his article’s cleverer and worth-reading if you’re following the WordPress Drama (but it’s pretty long!).
tl;dr: I’m tidying up and consolidating my personal hosting; I’ve made a little progress, but I’ve got a way to go – fortunately I’ve got a sabbatical coming up at work!
At the weekend, I kicked-off what will doubtless be a multi-week process of gradually tidying and consolidating some of the disparate digital things I run, around the Internet.
I’ve a long-standing habit of having an idea (e.g. gamebook-making tool Twinebook, lockpicking puzzle game Break Into Us, my Cheating Hangman game, and even FreeDeedPoll.org.uk!), deploying it to one of several servers I run, and then finding it a huge headache when I inevitably need to upgrade or move said server because there’s such an insane diversity of different things that need testing!
I can simplify, I figured. So I did.
And in doing so, I rediscovered several old projects I’d neglected or forgotten about. I wonder if anybody’s still using any of them?
It turns out GitHub pages is a fine place to host simple, static websites that were open-source already. I’ve been working on improving my understanding of GitHub Actions anyway as part of what I’ve been doing while wearing my work, volunteering, and personal hats, so switching some static build processes like DNDle’s to GitHub Actions was a useful exercise.
There’s still a few things I need to tidy up to bring my personal hosting situation under control:
This is the big one, because it’s not just a WordPress blog: it’s also a Gemini, Spartan, and Gopher server (thanks CapsulePress!), a Finger server, a general-purpose host to a stack of complex stuff only some of which is powered by Bloq (my WordPress/PHP integrations): e.g. code to generate the maps that appear on my geopositioned posts, code to integrate with the Fediverse, a whole stack of configuration to make my caching work the way I want, etc.
Right now this is a Ruby/Sinatra application, but I’ve got a (long-running) development branch that will make it run completely in the browser, which will further improve privacy, allow it to run entirely-offline (with a service worker), and provide a basis for new features I’d like to provide down the line. I’m hoping to get to finishing this during my Automattic sabbatical this winter.
A secondary benefit of it becoming browser-based, of course, is that it can be hosted as a static site, which will allow me to move it to GitHub Pages too.
When I took over running the world’s geohashing hub from xkcd‘s Randall Munroe (and davean), I flung the site together on whatever hosting I had sitting around at the time, but that’s given me some headaches. The outbound email transfer agent is a pain, for example, and it’s a hard host on which to apply upgrades. So I want to get that moved somewhere better this winter too. It’s actually the last site left running on its current host, so it’ll save me a little money to get it moved, too!
Right now I run this on my NAS, but that turns out to be a pain sometimes because it means that if my home Internet goes down (e.g. thanks to a power cut, which we have from time to time), I lose access to the first and last place I go on the Internet! So I’d quite like to move that to somewhere on the open Internet. Haven’t worked out where yet.
It’s felt good so far to consolidate and tidy-up my personal web hosting (and to rediscover some old projects I’d forgotten about). There’s work still to do, but I’m expecting to spend a few months not-doing-my-day-job very soon, so I’m hoping to find the opportunity to finish it then!
An amazing CSS effect by Ana Tudor:
Wow, this is real pretty!
(You can edit that text. Really: try it!)
I’ve only recently (thanks, Spencer!) gained any level of understanding about the use of SVG filters in CSS, so this is doubly-impressive to me.
At work, we recently switched expenses system to one with virtual credit card functionality. I decided to test it out by buying myself lounge access for my upcoming work trip to Mexico. Unfortunately the new system mis-detected my lounge access as being a purchase from lingerie company loungeunderwear.com. I’m expecting a ping from Finance any moment to ask me why I’m using a company credit card to buy a bra.
One might ask why our expenses provider can (mis-)identify loungeunderwear.com from a transaction in the first place. Did somebody at some company that uses this provider actually buy some ladies’ briefs on a company credit card at some point?
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Cast your mind back to 15½ years ago, when the Internet was delighted by The Duck Song, a stupid adaptation of an already-ancient joke, presented as a song for a child and accompanied by some MS Paint-grade animation. It was catchy, though, and before long everybody had it stuck in their heads.
Over the subsequent year it was followed by The Duck Song 2 and The Duck Song 3, each in a similar vein but with a different accompanying joke. There’s sort-of an ongoing narrative – a story arc – than spans the three, as the foils of the first and second are introduced to one another in the third in a strange duck-related meet-cute.
And then there was nothing for… well, almost 14 years. The creators went on to do other things, and we all assumed that this series was completed (unlike for example the Wave Hello trilogy I mentioned the other day, which is clearly supposed to get one more part, and is overdue!). That’s fine, of course. Things are allowed to finish, contrary to what many American TV execs seem to think.
Then last year, we got a seasonal treat in the form of The Christmas Duck Song. It felt like a non-canonical spinoff, though, not a true “fourth Duck Song”. Like the Star Wars Holiday Special. Except good. It’s appearance wasn’t taken as heralding a return of duck songs.
But perhaps it should’ve, because earlier this year we got The Duck Song 4! Yet again, it retells a stupid joke – in this case, an especially silly and immature one – but man, it feels like an old friend coming home. Welcome back, Duck Song.
I don’t think I’ve done justice to it, though. Perhaps the
Permit yourself to be entranced by the magnificence of the animation, the piquancy of the wordplay, the splendorous yet seductive simplicity of the G-C-D chord progression. Let the duck, like Virgil in Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” be your guide — lean into the quotidian but sempiternal question of whether the man at the lemonade stand has any grapes. Consider the irritation of the man at the stand and ask yourself if the wrath of Achilles is really that much more disastrous. Admire the cunning of the duck’s questioning — was Socrates so very different?
Yeah, that’s about right.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
We made it! This young furbaby managed to pose a bleppy picture every single day of Bleptember. Thanks for coming along for the ride!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
“You want more Bleptember pictures? I demand payment in the form of tummy-scritches!”
(Wow, it’s the penultimate day of Bleptember. )
The eldest is really getting into her WW2 studies at school, so I arranged a trip for her and a trip to the ever-excellent Bletchley Park for a glimpse at the code war that went on behind the scenes. They’re clearly looking forward to the opportunity to look like complete swots on Monday.
Bonus: I got to teach them some stories about some of my favourite cryptanalysts. (Max props to the undersung Mavis Batey!)
This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Noticed while on a dog walk that the container looked a little loose, so came by to tighten it up. Noticed that the logbook was missing – muggled? – so replaced that while I was here. Ready to go!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Tttttthbbptt. The sound of a bleppy dog deflating like a balloon, this Twenty-Eighth of Bleptember
Back when I was a student in Aberystwyth, I used to receive a lot of bilingual emails from the University and its departments1. I was reminded of this when I received an email this week from CACert, delivered in both English and German.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were some kind of standard for multilingual emails? Your email client or device would maintain an “order of preference” of the languages that you speak, and you’d automatically be shown the content in those languages, starting with the one you’re most-fluent in and working down.
The Web’s already got this functionality2, and people have been sending multilingual emails for much longer than they’ve been developing multilingual websites3!
It turns out that this is a (theoretically) solved problem. RFC8255 defines a mechanism for breaking an email into multiple different languages in a way that a machine can understand and that ought to be backwards-compatible (so people whose email software doesn’t support it yet can still “get by”). Here’s how it works:
Content-Type: multipart/multilingual header with a defined boundary marker, just like you would for any other email with multiple “parts” (e.g. with a HTML
and a plain text version, or with text content and an attachment).
text/plain (or similar) part, containing e.g. some text to explain that this is a multilingual email, and if you’re seeing this
then your email client probably doesn’t support them, but you should just be able to scroll down (or else look at the attachments) to find content in the language you read.
Content-Disposition: inline, so that for most people using non-compliant email software they can just scroll down until they find a language they can read,
Content-Type: message/rfc822, so that an entire message can be embedded (which allows other headers, like the Subject:, to be translated too),
Content-Language: header, specifying the ISO code of the language represented in that section, and
Content-Translation-Type: header, specifying either original (this is the original text), human (this was translated by a
human), or automated (this was the result of machine translation) – this could be used to let a user say e.g. that they’d prefer a human translation to an automated
one, given the choice between two second languages.
Let’s see a sample email:
Content-Type: multipart/multilingual; boundary=10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664 To: <b24571@danq.me> From: <rfc8255test-noreply@danq.link> Subject: Does your email client support RFC8255? Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:06:56 +0000 --10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 This is a multipart message in multiple languages. Each part says the same thing but in a different language. If your email client supports RFC8255, you will see this message in your preferred language out of those available. Otherwise, you will probably see each language after one another or else each language in a separate attachment. --10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Language: en Content-Translation-Type: original Subject: Does your email client support RFC8255? Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit MIME-Version: 1.0 RFC8255 is a standard for sending email in multiple languages. This is the original email in English. It is embedded alongside the same content in a number of other languages. --10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Language: fr Content-Translation-Type: automated Subject: Votre client de messagerie prend-il en charge la norme RFC8255? Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit MIME-Version: 1.0 RFC8255 est une norme permettant d'envoyer des courriers électroniques dans plusieurs langues. Le présent est le courriel traduit en français. Il est intégré à côté du même contenu contenu dans un certain nombre d'autres langues. --10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664--
That proposed standard turns seven years old next month. Sooo… can we start using it?4
Turns out… not so much. I discovered that NeoMutt supports it:
Support in other clients is… variable.
A reasonable number of them don’t understand the multilingual directives but still show the email in a way that doesn’t suck:
Some shoot for the stars but blow up on the launch pad:
Others still seem to be actively trying to make life harder for you:
.eml attachments… which is then won’t display, forcing you to download them and
find some other email client to look at them in!5
And still others just shit the bed at the idea that you might read an email like this one:
That’s just the clients I’ve tested, but I can’t imagine that others are much different. If you give it a go yourself with something I’ve not tried, then let me know!
I guess this means that standardised multilingual emails might be forever resigned to the “nice to have but it never took off so we went in a different direction” corner of the
Internet, along with the <keygen> HTML element and the concept of privacy.
1 I didn’t receive quite as much bilingual email as you might expect, given that the University committed to delivering most of its correspondence in both English and Welsh. But I received a lot more than I do nowadays, for example
2 Although you might not guess it, given how many websites completely ignore your
Accept-Language header, even where it’s provided, and simply try to “guess” what language you want using IP geolocation or something, and then require that you find
whatever shitty bit of UI they’ve hidden their language selector behind if you want to change it, storing the result in a cookie so it inevitably gets lost and has to be set again the
next time you visit.
3 I suppose that if you were sending HTML emails then you might use the lang="..." attribute to mark up different parts of the message as being in different
languages. But that doesn’t solve all of the problems, and introduces a couple of fresh ones.
4 If it were a cool new CSS feature, you can guarantee that it’d be supported by every major browser (except probably Safari) by now. But email doesn’t get so much love as the Web, sadly.
5 Worse yet, if you’re using ProtonMail with a third-party client, ProtonMail screws up
RFC8255 emails so badly that they don’t even work properly in e.g. NeoMutt any more! ProtonMail swaps the multipart/multilingual content type for
multipart/mixed and strips the Content-Language: headers, making the entire email objectively less-useful.