The week before last I had the opportunity to deliver a “flash talk” of up to 4 minutes duration at a work meetup
in Vienna, Austria. I opted to present a summary of what I’ve learned while adding support for Finger and Gopher protocols to the WordPress installation that powers DanQ.me (I also hinted at the fact that I already added Gemini and Spring ’83 support, and I’m looking at
other protocols). If you’d like to see how it went, you can watch my flash talk here or on
YouTube.
If you love the idea of working from wherever-you-are but ocassionally meeting your colleagues in person for fabulous in-person events with (now optional) flash talks like this, you
might like to look at Automattic’s recruitment pages…
The presentation is a shortened, Automattic-centric version of a talk I’ll be delivering tomorrow at Oxford Geek Nights #53; so if
you’d like to see it in-person and talk protocols with me over a beer, you should come along! There’ll probably be blog posts to follow with a more-detailed look at the how-and-why of
using WordPress as a CMS not only for the Web but for a variety of zany, clever, retro, and retro-inspired protocols down the
line, so perhaps consider the video above a “teaser”, I guess?
A quick find while exploring the city after spending a few days meeting work colleagues from around the globe. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
TFTC/DFDC!
Carl Auer, Freiherr von Welsbach is, of course, best known as the inventor of the gas mantle, but he also isolated two previously-undiscovered chemical elements.
Saw the cache almost right away but had to stand around for a while pretending to read something on my phone while muggles passed by. SL, TFTC. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.
The second spectacular cache I’ve found from this CO. Absolutely amazing. Coordinates got me close, but it was only when I started looking
around that I spotted something that didn’t look quite right and found the cache. Amazing work, FP awarded.
Superb cache, my favourite in Vienna so far. Love the design; I might try to make one like this back in Oxfordshire, UK upon my return!
FP awarded.
Coordinates put me exactly where I needed to be. Fortunately I had exactly what I needed to retrieve the cache: it’s something I always carry when I’m caching anyway!
I’ve been in Vienna for a week to meet work colleagues, and today – our meetings at an end and still with a few hours before my plane leaves – I
decided to come out and find some local geocaches.
At the GZ there were lots of good hiding places so I reached over and around. In a few seconds my fingers touched the cache. Great!
But then – disaster! As others have observed, the magnets in this cache aren’t the
strongest and it bounced free. It fell a long, long way! I rushed across the road and down to the lower level to grab it. Luckily the cache container was unharmed, so I signed the log
as I carried it back to up its hiding place. What an adventure!
FP awarded for the cool container and hiding place, and for the fun story you helped me tell. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK. TFTC!
You know who’s having a killer month? Automattic. Everyone who’s leaving Twitter seem to fall in at least one of these three camps:
They have gone back to the blogosphere. (using WordPress, or WordPress.com)
They have gone to Tumblr
They have gone to the fediverse (of which a fairly large percentage are WordPress installs)
In all of these cases, Automattic wins.
…
Some smart observations here by Alex. A fourth point worth noting is that Matt has openly suggested that former Twitter engineers might like to come join us in Automattic and help make the web a
better place. We’ve changed our careers pages a little lately but we’re still the same awesome
company!
I’ll be downright shocked if Matt isn’t working very hard to get Tumblr on the fediverse ASAP. He has so much to gain in supporting this movement, and very little to lose.
That’s definitely on his mind too, which I can safely say without leaking anything because he’s hinted at it himself. Exciting times.
This weekend I was experimentally reimplenting how my blog displays comments. For testing I needed to find an old post with both trackbacks and pingbacks on it. I found my post that you linked, here, and was delighted to be reminded that despite both of our blogs changing domain name (from photomatt.net to ma.tt
and from blog.scatmania.org to danq.me, respectively), all the links back and forth still work perfectly because clearly we share an apporopriate dedication to the principle that
Cool URIs Don’t Change, and set up our redirects accordingly. 🙌
Incidentally, this was about the point in time at which I first thought to myself “hey, I like what Matt’s doing with this Automattic thing; I should work there someday”. It took me
like a decade to a decade-and-a-half to get around to applying, though… 😅
Anyway: thanks for keeping your URIs cool so I could enjoy this trip down memory lane (and debug an experimental wp_list_comments callback!).
This post is also available as an article. So if you'd rather read a
conventional blog post of this content, you can!
This video accompanies a blog post of the same title. The content is basically the same – if you prefer videos, watch this video. If you prefer blog posts, go read
the blog post. If you’re a superfan, try both and spot the differences. You weirdo.
There are a great number of things that I’m bad at. One thing I’m bad at (but that I’m trying to get better at) is being more-accepting of the fact that there are things that I am bad
at.
I’ve also been thinking about how I’m bad at thinking about how I’m bad at thinking about how I’m bad at thinking about…
I’m also particularly bad at choosing suitable stock photos for use in blog posts.
Being Bad
As a young kid, I was a smart cookie. I benefited from being an only child and getting lots of attention from a pair of clever parents, but I was also pretty bright and a quick learner
with an interest in just about anything I tried. This made me appear naturally talented at a great many things, and – pushed-on by the praise of teachers, peers, and others – I
discovered that I could “coast” pretty easily.
But a flair for things will only carry you so far, and a problem with not having to work hard at your education means that you don’t learn how to learn. I got bitten
by this when I was in higher education, when I found that I actually had to work at getting new information to stick in my head (of course, being older makes learning harder
too, as became especially obvious to me during my most-recent qualification)!
Ignore the fact that you’ve now seen me trying to sledge uphill and just accept that I was a clever kid (except at
photography), okay?
A side-effect of these formative experiences is that I grew into an adult who strongly differentiated between two distinct classes of activities:
Things I was good at, either because of talent or because I’d thoroughly studied them already. I experienced people’s admiration and respect when I practised these
things, and it took little effort to stay “on top” of these fields, and
Things I was bad at, because I didn’t have a natural aptitude and hadn’t yet put the time in to learning them. We don’t often give adults external
reinforcement for “trying hard”, and I’d become somewhat addicted to being seen as awesome… so I shied away from things I was “bad at”.
The net result: I missed out on opportunities to learn new things, simply because I didn’t want to be seen as going through the “amateur” phase. In hindsight, that’s
really disappointing! And this “I’m bad at (new) things” attitude definitely fed into the imposter syndrome I felt when I first
started at Automattic.
Being Better
Leaving the Bodleian after 8½ years might have helped stimulate a change in me. I’d carved out a role for myself defined by the fields I knew
best; advancing my career would require that I could learn new things. But beyond that, I benefited from my new employer whose “creed
culture” strongly promotes continuous learning (I’ve vlogged about this before), and from my coach who’s been great at encouraging me towards a growth mindset.
“Good Luck Dan”, my Bodleian buddies said. But perhaps they should’ve said “Keep Learning Dan”.
But perhaps the biggest stimulus to remind me to keep actively learning, even (especially?) when it’s hard, might have been the pandemic. Going slightly crazy with cabin fever during
the second lockdown, I decided to try and teach myself how to play the piano. Turns out I wasn’t alone, as I’ve mentioned before: the pandemic did strange things to us all.
I have no real experience of music; I didn’t even get to play recorder in primary school. And I’ve certainly got no talent for it (I can hear well enough to tell how awful my
singing is, but that’s more a curse than a blessing). Also, every single beginners’ book and video course I looked at starts from the assumption that you’re going to want to “feel” your
way into it, and that just didn’t sit well with the way my brain works.
90% of what I do in front of a piano might be described as “Dan Mucks About (in B Minor)”, but that’s fine by me.
I wanted a theoretical background before I even sat down at a keyboard, so I took a free online course in music theory. Then I started working through a
“beginners’ piano” book we got for the kids. Then I graduated to “first 50 Disney songs”, because I know how virtually all of them sound well enough that I’d be able to hear where I was
going wrong. Since then, I’ve started gradually making my way through a transcription of Einaudi’s Islands. Feeling like I’d got a good handle on what I was supposed to be
doing, I then took inspiration from a book JTA gave me and started trying to improvise.
Most days, I get no more than about 10 minutes on the piano. But little by little, day by day, that’s enough to learn. Nowadays even my inner critic perfectionist can
tolerate hearing myself play. And while I know that I’ll probably never be as good as, say, the average 8-year-old on YouTube, I’m content in my limited capacity.
Let’s start at the very beginning. (A very good place to start.)
If I’m trying to cultivate my wonder syndrome, I need to stay alert for “things I’m bad at” that I could conceivably be better at if
I were just brave enough to try to learn. I’m now proudly an “embarrassingly amateur” pianist, which I’m at-long-last growing to see as better than a being non-pianist.
Off the back of that experience, I’m going to try to spend more time doing things that I’m bad at. And I’d encourage you to do the same.
Ruth wrote an excellent post this month entitled Wonder Syndrome.
It attempts to reframe imposter syndrome (which is strongly, perhaps disproportionately, present in tech fields) as a
positive indicator that there’s still more to learn:
Being aware of the boundaries of our knowledge doesn’t make us imposters, it makes us explorers. I’m going to start calling mine “Wonder Syndrome”, and allowing myself to be awed by
how much I still have to learn, and then focusing in and carrying on with what I’m doing because although I may not reach the stars, I’ve come a long way up the mountain. I can learn
these things, I can solve these problems, and I will.
I don’t recall exactly what I’m advising a fellow Three Rings developer to do, here, but I don’t think he’s happy about it.
I just spent a week at a Three Rings DCamp (a “hackathon”, kinda), and for the umpteenth time had the experience of feeling like
everybody thinks I know everything, while on the inside I still feel like I’m still guessing a third of the time (and on StackOverflow for another third!).
The same’s true at work: people ask me questions about things that I suppose, objectively, are my “specialist subjects” – web standards, application security, progressive enhancement,
VAT for some reason – and even where I’m able to help, I often get that nagging feeling like
there must be somebody better than me they could have gone to?
You’ve probably seen diagrams like this before. After all: I’m not smart or talented enough to invent anything like this and I don’t know why you’d listen to anything I have to say on
the subject anyway. 😂
You might assume that I love Ruth’s post principally because it plays to my vanity. The post describes two kinds of knowledgeable developers, who are differentiated primarily by their
attitude to learning. One is satisfied with the niche they’ve carved out for themselves and the status that comes with it and are content to rest on their laurels; the other is driven
to keep pushing and learning more and always hungry for the next opportunity to grow. And the latter category… Ruth’s named after me.
Wait, what if I’m not‽ Have I been faking it this entire blog post?
Bnd while I love the post, my gut feeling to being named after such an ideal actually makes me slightly uncomfortable. The specific sentence that gets me is (emphasis mine):
Dans have no interest in being better than other people, they just want to know more than they did yesterday.
I wish that was me, but I’m actually moderately-strongly motivated by a desire to feel like I’m the smartest person in the room! I’m getting this urge under control (I’m pretty
sure I was intolerable as a child and have been improving by instalments since then!). Firstly, because it’s an antisocial pattern to foster, but also because it limits my ability to
learn new things to have to go through the awkward, mistake-filled “I’m a complete amateur at this!” phase. But even as I work on this I still get that niggling urge, more often than
I’d like, to “show off”.
Of course, it could well be that what I’m doing right now is catastrophising. I’m taking a nice thing somebody’s said about me, picking the one part of it that I find hardest to feel
represents me, and deciding that I must be a fraud. Soo… imposter syndrome, I guess. Damn.
Or to put it a better way: Wonder Syndrome. I guess this is another area for self-improvement.
(I’m definitely adopting Wonder Syndrome into my vocabulary, as an exercise in mitigating imposter syndrome. If you’ve not read Ruth’s post in full, you should go and do that next.)
[Nilay:]It is fashionable to run around saying the web is dead and that apps shape the world, but in my mind, the web’s pretty healthy for at least two things: news
and shopping.
[Matt:] I think that’s your bubble, if I’m totally honest. That’s what’s cool about the web: We can live in a bubble and that can seem like the whole thing. One thing I would
explicitly try to do in 2022 is make the web weirder.
…
The Verge interviewed Matt Mullenweg, and – as both an Automattician and a fan of the Web as
a place for fun and weirdness – I really appreciated the direction the interview went in. I maintain that open web standards and platforms (as opposed to closed social media silos)
are inspirational and innovative.
Emilie Reed‘s Anything a Maze lives on itch.io, and (outside of selfhosting) that’s
clearly the best place for it: you couldn’t tell that story the same way on Medium; even less-so on Facebook or Twitter.
Off the back of my recent post about privileges I enjoy as a result of my location and first language, even at my highly-multinational employer, and inspired by my colleague Atanas‘ data-mining into where Automatticians are
located, I decided to do another treemap, this time about which countries Automatticians call home:
Where are the Automatticians?
If raw data’s your thing (or if you’re just struggling to make out the names of the countries with fewer Automatticians), here’s
a CSV file for you.
To get a better picture of that, let’s plot a couple of cartograms. This animation cycles between showing countries at (a) their
actual (landmass) size and (b) approximately proportional to the number of Automatticians based in each country:
This animation alternates between showing countries at “actual size” and proportional to the number of Automatticians based there. North America and Europe dominate the map, but there
are other quirks too: look at e.g. how South Africa, New Zealand and India balloon.
Another way to consider the data would be be comparing (a) the population of each country to (b) the number of Automatticians there. Let’s try that:
Here we see countries proportional to their relative population change shape to show number of Automatticians, as seen before. Notice how countries with larger populations like China
shrink away to nothing while those with comparatively lower population density like Australia blow up.
There’s definitely something to learn from these maps about the cultural impact of our employee diversity, but I can’t say more about that right now… primarily because I’m not smart
enough, but also at least in part because I’ve watched the map animations for too long and made myself seasick.
A note on methodology
A few quick notes on methodology, for the nerds out there who’ll want to argue with me:
Country data was extracted directly from Automattic’s internal staff directory today and is based on self-declaration by employees (this is relevant because we employ a relatively
high number of “digital nomads”, some of whom might not consider any one country their home).
Countries were mapped to continents using this dataset.
Maps are scaled using Robinson projection. Take your arguments about this over here.
The treemaps were made using Excel. The cartographs were produced based on work by Gastner MT, Seguy V, More P. [Fast flow-based algorithm for creating density-equalizing map
projections. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 115(10):E2156–E2164 (2018)].
Some countries have multiple names or varied name spellings and I tried to detect these and line-up the data right but apologies if I made a mess of it and missed yours.
