The news has, in general, been pretty terrible lately.
Like many folks, I’ve worked to narrow the focus of the things that I’m willing to care deeply about, because caring about many things is just too difficult when, y’know, nazis
are trying to destroy them all.
I’ve got friends who’ve stopped consuming news media entirely. I’ve not felt the need to go so far, and I think the reason is that I already have a moderately-disciplined
relationship with news. It’s relatively easy for me to regulate how much I’m exposed to all the crap news in the world and stay focussed and forward-looking.
The secret is that I get virtually all of my news… through my feed reader (some of it pre-filtered, e.g. my de-crappified BBC News feeds).
I use FreshRSS and I love it. But really: any feed reader can improve your relationship with
the Web.
Without a feed reader, I can see how I might feel the need to “check the news” several times a day. Pick up my phone to check the time… glance at the news while I’m there… you know how
to play that game, right?
But with a feed reader, I can treat my different groups of feeds like… periodicals. The news media I subscribe to get collated in my feed reader and I can read them once, maybe twice
per day, just like a daily newspaper. If an article remains unread for several days then, unless I say otherwise, it’s configured to be quietly archived.
My current events are less like a firehose (or sewage pipe), and more like a bottle of (filtered) water.
Categorising my feeds means that I can see what my friends are doing almost-immediately, but I don’t have to be disturbed by anything else unless I want to be. Try getting that
from a siloed social network!
Maybe sometimes I see a new breaking news story… perhaps 12 hours after you do. Is that such a big deal? In exchange, I get to apply filters of any kind I like to the news I read, and I
get to read it as a “bundle”, missing (or not missing) as much or as little as I like.
On a scale from “healthy media consumption” to “endless doomscrolling”, proper use of a feed reader is way towards the healthy end.
If you stopped using feeds when Google tried to kill them, maybe it’s time to think again. The ecosystem’s alive and well, and having a one-stop place where you can
enjoy the parts of the Web that are most-important to you, personally, in an ad-free, tracker-free, algorithmic-filtering-free space that you can make your very own… brings a
special kind of peace that I can highly recommend.
The W3C‘s WebDX Community Group this week announced that they’ve reached a milestone with their web-features project. The project is an effort to catalogue browser support for Web features, to establish an
understanding of the baseline feature set that developers can rely on.
That’s great, and I’m in favour of the initiative. But I wonder about graphs like this one:
The graph shows the increase in time of the number of features available on the Web, broken down by how widespread they are implemented across the browser corpus.
The shape of that graph sort-of implies that… more features is better. And I’m not entirely convinced that’s true.
Does “more” imply “better”?
Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of Web features that are excellent. The kinds of things where it’s hard to remember how I did without them. CSS grids are for many purposes an
improvement on flexboxes; flexboxes were massively better than floats; and floats were an enormous leap forwards compared to using tables for layout! The “new” HTML5 input types are
wonderful, as are the revolutionary native elements for video, audio, etc. I’ll even sing the praises of some of the new JavaScript APIs (geolocation, web share, and push are
particular highlights).
But it’s not some kind of universal truth that “more features means better developer experience”. It’s already the case, for example, that getting started as a Web developer is
harder than it once was, and I’d argue harder than it ought to be. There exist complexities nowadays that are barriers to entry. Like the places where the promise of a
progressively-enhanced Web has failed (they’re rare, but they exist). Or the sheer plethora of features that come with caveats to their use that simply must be learned (yes, you need a
<meta name="viewport">; no, you can’t rely on JS to produce content).
Meanwhile, there are technologies that were standardised, and that we did need, but that never took off. The <keygen> element never got
implemented into the then-dominant Internet Explorer (there were other implementation problems too, but this one’s the killer). This made it functionally useless, which meant that its
standard never evolved and grew. As a result, its implementation in other browsers stagnated and it was eventually deprecated. Had it been implemented properly and iterated on, we’d
could’ve had something like WebAuthn over a decade earlier.
Which I guess goes to show that “more features is better” is only true if they’re the right features. Perhaps there’s some way of tracking the changing landscape of developer
experience on the Web that doesn’t simply count enumerate a baseline of widely-available features? I don’t know what it is, though!
A simple web
Mostly, the Web worked fine when it was simpler. And while some of the enhancements we’ve seen over the decades are indisputably an advancement, there are also plenty of places
where we’ve let new technologies lead us astray. Third-party cookies appeared as a naive consequence of first-party ones, but came to be used to undermine everybody’s privacy. Dynamic
DOM manipulation started out as a clever idea to help with things like form validation and now a significant number of websites can’t even show their images – or sometimes their text –
unless their JavaScript code gets downloaded and interpreted successfully.
Were you reading this article on Medium, you’d have downloaded ~5MB of data including 48 JS files and had 7 cookies set, just so you could… have most of the text covered with
popovers? (for comparison, reading it here takes about half a megabyte and the cookies are optional delicious)
A blog post, news article, or even an eCommerce site or social networking platform doesn’t need the vast majority of the Web’s “new” features. Those features are important for some Web
applications, but most of the time, we don’t need them. But somehow they end up being used anyway.
Whether or not the use of unnecessary new Web features is a net positive to developer experience is debatable. But it’s certainly not often to the benefit of user experience.
And that’s what I care about.
Last month my pest of a dog destroyed my slippers, and it was more-disruptive to my life than I would have anticipated.
Look what you did, you troublemaker.
Sure, they were just a pair of slippers1, but they’d
become part of my routine, and their absence had an impact.
Routines are important, and that’s especially true when you work from home. After I first moved to Oxford and started doing entirely remote work for the first time, I found the transition challenging2.
To feel more “normal”, I introduced an artificial “commute” into my day: going out of my front door and walking around the block in the morning, and then doing the same thing in reverse
in the evening.
My original remote working office, circa 2010.
It turns out that in the 2020s my slippers had come to serve a similar purpose – “bookending” my day – as my artificial commute had over a decade earlier. I’d slip them on when I was at
my desk and working, and slide them off when my workday was done. With my “work” desk being literally the same space as my “not work” desk, the slippers were a psychological reminder of
which “mode” I was in. People talk about putting on “hats” as a metaphor for different roles and personas they hold, but for me… the distinction was literal footwear.
And so after a furry little monster (who for various reasons hadn’t had her customary walk yet that day and was probably feeling a little frustrated) destroyed my slippers… it actually
tripped me up3. I’d be doing
something work-related and my feet would go wandering, of their own accord, to try to find their comfortable slip-ons, and when they failed, my brain would be briefly tricked
into glancing down to look for them, momentarily breaking my flow. Or I’d be distracted by something non-work-related and fail to get back into the zone without the warm, toe-hugging
reminder of what I should be doing.
It wasn’t a huge impact. But it wasn’t nothing either.
The bleppy little beast hasn’t expressed an interest in my replacement slippers, yet. Probably because they’re still acquiring the smell of my feet, which I’m guessing is
what interested her in the first place.
So I got myself a new pair of slippers. They’re a different design, and I’m not so keen on the lack of an enclosed heel, but they solved the productivity and focus problem I was facing.
It’s strange how such a little thing can have such a big impact.
Oh! And d’ya know what? This is my hundredth blog post of the year so far! Coming on only the 73rd day of the year, this is my fastest run at
#100DaysToOffload yet (my previous best was last year, when I managed the same on 22 April). 73 is exactly a fifth of 365, so… I guess I’m on
track for a mammoth 500 posts this year? Which would be my second-busiest blogging year ever, after 2018. Let’s see how I get on…4
Footnotes
1 They were actually quite a nice pair of slippers. JTA got them for me as a gift a few years back, and they lived either on my feet or under my desk ever since.
2 I was working remotely for a company where everybody else was working
in-person. That kind of hybrid setup is a lot harder to do “right”, as many companies in this post-Covid-lockdowns age have discovered, and it’s understandable that I found it
somewhat isolating. I’m glad to say that the experience of working for my current employer – who are entirely distributed –
is much more-supportive.
3 Figuratively, not literally. Although I would probably have literally tripped
over had I tried to wear the tattered remains of my shredded slippers!
I’d already read every prior book published by the excellent Becky Chambers, but this (and its sequel) had been sitting on my to-read list for some time,
and so while I’ve been ill and off work these last few days, I felt it would be a perfect opportunity to
pick it up. I’ve spent most of this week so far in bed, often drifting in and out of sleep, and a lightweight novella that I coud dip in and out of over the course of a day felt like
the ideal comfort.
I couldn’t have been more right, as the very first page gave away. My friend Ash described the experience of reading it (and
its sequel) as being “like sitting in a warm bath”, and I see where they’re coming from. True to form, Chambers does a magnificent job of spinning a believable utopia: a world that acts
like an idealised future while still being familiar enough for the reader to easily engage with it. The world of Wild-Built is inhabited by humans whose past saw them come
together to prevent catastrophic climate change and peacefully move beyond their creation of general-purpose AI, eventually building for themselves a post-scarcity economy based on
caring communities living in harmony with their ecosystem.
Writing a story in a utopia has sometimes been seen as challenging, because without anything to strive for, what is there for a protagonist to strive against? But
Wild-Built has no such problem. Written throughout with a close personal focus on Sibling Dex, a city monk who decides to uproot their life to travel around the various
agrarian lands of their world, a growing philosophical theme emerges: once ones needs have been met, how does one identify with ones purpose? Deprived of the struggle to climb
some Maslowian pyramid, how does a person freed of their immediate needs (unless they choose to take unnecessary risks: we hear of hikers who die exploring the uncultivated
wilderness Dex’s people leave to nature, for example) define their place in the world?
Aside from Dex, the other major character in the book is Mosscap, a robot whom they meet by a chance encounter on the very edge of human civilisation. Nobody has seen a robot for
centuries, since such machines became self-aware and, rather than consign them to slavery, the humans set them free (at which point they vanished to go do their own thing).
To take a diversion from the plot, can I just share for a moment a few lines from an early conversation between Dex and Mosscap, in which I think the level of mutual interpersonal
respect shown by the characters mirrors the utopia of the author’s construction:
…
“What—what are you? What is this? Why are you here?”
The robot, again, looked confused. “Do you not know? Do you no longer speak of us?”
“We—I mean, we tell stories about—is robots the right word? Do you call yourself robots or something else?”
“Robot is correct.”
…
“Okay. Mosscap. I’m Dex. Do you have a gender?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
These two strangers take the time in their initial introduction to ensure they’re using the right terms for one another: starting with those relating to their… let’s say
species… and then working towards pronouns (Dex uses they/them, which seems to be widespread and commonplace but far from universal in their society; Mosscap uses it/its, which
provides for an entire discussion on the nature of objectship and objectification in self-identity). It’s queer as anything, and a delightful touch.
In any case: the outward presence of the plot revolves around a question that the robot has been charged to find an answer to: “What do humans need?” The narrative theme of self-defined
purpose and desires is both a presenting and a subtextual issue, and it carries through every chapter. The entire book is as much a thought experiment as it is a
novel, but it doesn’t diminish in the slightest from the delightful adventure that carries it.
Dex and Mosscap go on to explore the world, to learn more about it and about one another, and crucially about themselves and their place in it. It’s charming and wonderful and uplifting
and, I suppose, like a warm bath: comfortable and calming and centering. And it does an excellent job of setting the stage for the second book in the series, which we’ll get to presently…
As I mentioned in my recent Blog Questions Challenge, I recently switched my blog from WordPress, which it had been running on for over 20 years of its 26 year history, to ClassicPress.1
I’m aware that I’m not the only person for whom ClassicPress might be a better fit than WordPress2,
so I figured I should share the process by which I undertook the change.
Switching from WordPress to ClassicPress
Switching from WordPress to ClassicPress should be a non-destructive, 100% reversible process, but (even though I’ve got solid backups) I wasn’t ready to
trust that, so I decided to operate on a copy of my site. I’m glad I did, because there were a couple of teething issues I needed to tackle before I could launch.
1. Duplicating the site
I took a simple approach to duplicating the site: (1) I copied the site directory, and (2) I copied the database, and (3) I set up a new subdomain to use for testing. Here’s how I did
each step:
1.1. Copying the site directory
This should’ve been simple, but a du -sh revealed that my /wp-content/uploads directory is massive (I should look into that) and I didn’t want to
clone it. And I didn’t want r need to clone my /wp-content/cache directory either. So I ran:
rsync -av --exclude=wp-content ./old-site-directory/ ./new-site-directory/ to copy everything exceptwp-content, and then
rsync -av --exclude=uploads --exclude=cache ./old-site-directory/wp-content/ ./new-site-directory/wp-content/ to copy wp-contentexcept the
uploads and cache subdirectories, and then finally
ln -s ./old-site-directory/wp-content/uploads ./new-site-directory/wp-content/uploads to symlink the uploads directory, sharing it between the two sites
1.2. Copying the database
I just piped mysqldump into mysql to clone from one database to the other:
mysqldump -uUSERNAME -p --lock-tables=false old-site-database | mysql -uUSERNAME -p new-site-database
I edited DB_NAME in wp-config.php in the new site’s directory to point it at the new database.
If you’re going to clone your WordPress site before converting to ClassicPress, you’ll want to be comfortable editing your wp-config.php.
1.3. Setting up a new subdomain
My DNS is already configured with a wildcard to point (almost) all *.danq.me subdomains to this server already. I decided to use the name classicpress-testing.danq.me as my
temporary/test domain name. To keep any “changes” to my cloned site to a minimum, I overrode the domain name in my wp-config.php rather than in my database, by adding the
following lines:
Because I use Caddy/FrankenPHP as my webserver3,
configuration was really easy: I just copied the relevant part of my Caddyfile (actually an include), changed the domain name and the root, and it just worked,
even provisioning me out a LetsEncrypt SSL certificate. Magical4.
2. Switching the duplicate to ClassicPress
Now that I had a duplicate copy of my blog running at https://classicpress-testing.danq.me/, it was time to switch it to ClassicPress. I started by switching my wp-admin
colour scheme to a different one in my cloned site, so it’d be immediately visually-obvious to me if I’d accidentally switched and was editing the “wrong” site (I also made sure I was
logged-out of my primary, live site, so I was confident I wouldn’t break anything while I was experimenting!).
ClassicPress provides a migration plugin which checks for common problems and then switches your site
from WordPress to ClassicPress, so I installed it and ran it. It said that everything was okay except for my (custom) theme and a my self-built plugins, which it understandably couldn’t
check compatibility of. It recommended that I install Twenty Seventeen – the last WordPress default theme to not
require the block editor – but I didn’t do so: I was confident that my theme would work anyway… and if it didn’t, I’d want to fix it rather than switch theme!
I failed to take a screenshot of the actual process, but it looked broadly like this.
And then… it all broke.
3. Fixing what broke
After swiftly doing a safety-check that my live site was still intact, I started trying to work out why my site wasn’t broken. Debugging a ClassicPress PHP issue is functionally
identical to debugging a similar WordPress issue, for obvious reasons: check the logs, work out what’s broken, realise it’s a plugin, disable that plugin while you investigate further,
etc.
EWWW Image Optimizer: I use this plugin to pregenerate WebP variants of my images, which I then serve using webserver rules. It’s not a
complex job, and I should probably integrate the feature into my theme at some point, but for now I use this plugin. Version 8.0.0 of the plugin doesn’t work on ClassicPress 2.3.1, so
I used WP-CLI to downgrade to the last version that does (7.7.0), and then it worked fine.
Dan’s Geocaching Log Reposter: a self-made plugin that copies my logs from geocaching websites stopped working properly, which I think is because
ClassicPress is doing a more-aggressive job than WordPress at nonce validation on admin REST endpoints? I put a quick hack into my plugin to work around it, but I’ll need to look into
this properly at some point.
Some other bits of my stack, e.g. CapsulePress (my Gemini/Spartan/Nex server), have their own copies of my
database credentials, because I’ve been too lazy to centralise them into environment variables, and needed updating (but not until live switchover time).
I ran the two sites in-parallel for a couple of weeks, with the ClassicPress one as a “read only” version (so I didn’t pollute my uploads directory!), but it was pretty unnecessary
because it all worked pretty seamlessly, despite my complex stack of custom code. When I wanted to switch for-real, all I needed to do was swap the domain names over in my Caddyfile and
edit the wp-config.php of my ClassicPress installation: step 1.3, but in reverse!
If you hadn’t been told5, you probably wouldn’t have even known I’d made a change: I suppress basically all infrastructure-identifying
headers from my server output as a matter of course, and ClassicPress and WordPress are functionally-interchangeable from a front-end perspective6.
So what’s difference?
From my experience, here are the differences I’ve discovered since switching from WordPress to ClassicPress:
The good stuff
😅 ClassicPress has no Gutenberg/block editor. This would absolutely be a showstopper for many people, and that’s fine: I have nothing against the block editor (I
use it basically every day elsewhere!), but I’ve never really used it on danq.me and don’t feel the need to change that! My theme, my workflow, and my custom plugins are all
geared around the perfectly-good “classic” editor, and so getting a more-lightweight CMS by removing a feature I wasn’t using anyway falls somewhere between neutral and a blessing.
⚡The backend is fast again! One of the changes the ClassicPress team have been working on applying to WordPress is to strip out jQuery and other redundancies from
the backend, and I love how much faster and lighter my editor interface is as a result. (With caveat; see below!)
🔌Virtually everything “just works”. With the few exceptions described above, everything works exactly as it does under WordPress. Which is what you’d hope for a fork
that’s mostly “WordPress, but without the block editor”, right, but it’s still reassuring (and, for me, an essential feature). There are a few “new” features to do with paging through
posts and the media library and they’re fine, I suppose, but not by themselves worth switching for (though it might be nice to backport them into WordPress!).
The bad stuff
🏷️ Adding tags to posts takes a step backwards. A side-effect of dropping jQuery is the partial loss of the autocomplete feature when selecting tags to add to a post.
You still get a partial autocomplete, but not after typing a comma: you need to press enter to submit the tag you were writing and then start typing them next, which
frankly sucks. This is because they’re relying on a <datalist>, which isn’t as full-featured as the Javascript solution WordPress employs. This bugs
me almost enough to be a showstopper, but I gather it’s getting fixed in a near-future version.
🗺️ You’re in uncharted territory when things go wrong. One great benefit of WordPress is the side-effects of its ubiquity. If you have a query or a problem
you can throw a stone at your favourite search engine and get a million answers… and some of them will even be right! If you have a problem in ClassicPress and it’s not shared with (or
you’re not sure if it’s shared with) WordPress… you’re mostly on your own. The forums are good and friendly,
but if you want a quick answer to something, you’re likely to have to roll your sleeves up and open some source code. I don’t mind this at all – when I first started using WordPress,
this was the case, too! – but it might be a showstopper for some folks.
In summary: I’m enjoying using ClassicPress, even where there are rough edges. For me, 99% of my experience with it is identical to how I used WordPress anyway, it’s relatively
lightweight and fast, and it’s easy enough to switch back if I change my mind.
Footnotes
1 It saddens me that I have to keep clarifying this, but I feel like I do: my switch from
WordPress to ClassicPress is absolutely nothing to do with any drama in the WordPress space that’s going on right now: in fact, I’d been planning to try it out since before
any of the drama appeared. I appreciate that some people making a similar switch, including folks who use this blog post as a guide, might have different motivations to me, and that’s
fine too. Personally, I think that ditching an installation of open-source WordPress based on your interpretation of what’s going on in the ecosystem is… short-sighted? But
hey: the joy of open source is you can – and should! – do what you want. Anyway: the short of it is – the desire to change from WordPress to ClassicPress was, for me, 100% a
technical decision and 0% a political one. And I’ll thank you for leaving any of your drama at the door if you slide into my comments, ta!
2Matt recently described ClassicPress as “the last decent fork
attempt for WordPress”, and I absolutely agree. There’s been a spate of forks and reimplementations recently. I’ve looked into many of them and been… very much underwhelmed. Want my
hot take? Sure, here you go: AspirePress is all lofty ideas and no deliverables. FreeWP seems to be the same, but somehow without the lofty ideas. ForkPress is a ghost. Speaking of
ghosts, Ghost isn’t a WordPress fork; they have got some cool ideas though. b2evolution is even less a WordPress fork but it’s pretty cool in its own right. I’m not sure what
clamPress is trying to achieve but I’ve not given it a serious look. So yeah: ClassicPress is, in my mind, the only WordPress fork even worth consideration at this point, and as I
describe in this blog post: it’s not for everybody.
3 I switched from Nginx over the winter and it’s been just magical: I really love
Caddy’s minimal approach to production configuration. The only thing I’ve been able to fault it on is that it’s not capable of setting up client-side SSL certificate authentication on
a path, only on an entire domain, which meant I needed to reimplement the authentication mechanism I use on a small part of my (non-blog) internal
infrastructure.
4 To be fair, it wouldn’t have been hard if I’d still be using Nginx, because I’d
set up Certbot to use DNS-based vertification to issue me wildcard SSL certificates. But doing this in Caddy still felt magical.
6 Indeed, I wouldn’t have considered a switch to ClassicPress in the first place if it
wasn’t a closely-aligned-enough fork that I retained the ability to flip-flop between the two to my heart’s content! I’ve loved WordPress for over two decades; that’s not going to
change any time soon… and if e.g. ClassicPress ceased tracking WordPress releases and the fork diverged too far for my comfort, I’d probably switch back to regular old WordPress!
Large companies find HTML & CSS frustrating “at scale” because the web is a fundamentally anti-capitalist mashup art experiment, designed to give consumers all the power.
This. This is what I needed to be reminded, today.
When somebody complains that the Web is hard to scale, they’re already working against the grain of the Web.
At its simplest – and the way we used to use it – a website is a collection of .html files, one of which might have a special name so the webserver knows to put it first.
Writing HTML is punk rock. A “platform” is the tool of the establishment.
A straight white guy friend was complaining about not being able to find any gaming groups for WoW that weren’t full of MAGA assholes. He said he keeps joining guilds with older
(60+) casual gamers like himself because he can’t keep up with the kids, and he’ll start to make friends, but then they will reveal themselves to be Trump-lovers. He asked, “What am
I doing wrong?”
…
This was about 3 months ago. Now, he tells me he joined a guild labeled as LGBTQ-friendly and has made several new cool friends.
…
He mentioned that there are many women and PoC in the group too, and “Everyone’s so nice on dungeon runs, telling people they did a good job and being supportive, sharing loot.”
I didn’t tell him that this is what the whole world would be like without patriarchal toxic masculinity, because I think he figured it out himself.
I’ve plucked out the highlights, but the deeper moral is in the full anecdote. I especially loved “…furries are
like lichen…”. 😆
It turns out my seriesofefforts to improve the BBC News RSS feeds are more-popular than
I thought. People keep asking for variants of them, and it’s probably time I stopped hosting the resulting feeds on my NAS (which does a good job, but
it’s in a highly-kickable place right under my desk).
The new site isn’t pretty. But it works.
So I’ve launched BBC-Feeds.DanQ.dev. On a 20-minute schedule, it generates both UK and World editions of the BBC News feeds,
filtered to remove iPlayer, Sounds, app “nudges”, duplicates, and other junk, and optionally with the sports news filtered out too.
Their inclusion of non-news content such as plugs for iPlayer and their apps,
Their repeating of identical news stories with marginally-different GUIDs, and
All of the sports news, which I don’t care about one jot.
Well, it turns out that some people want #3: the sport. But still don’t want the other two.
Some people actually want to read this crap, apparently.
I shan’t be subscribing to this RSS feed, and I can’t promise I’ll fix it if it gets broken. But if “without the crap, but with the sports” is the way you like your BBC News RSS feed,
I’ve got you covered:
Today was my first day back at work after three months of paid leave1. I’d meant to write about the overall experience of my sabbatical and the things I gained
from it before I returned, but I’m glad I didn’t because one of the lessons only crystallised this morning.
This is about the point on the way back from the school run at which I pull out my phone and see what’s happening in the world or at work. But not today.
My typical work schedule sees me wake up some time before 06:30 so I can check my notifications, formulate my to-do list for the day, and so on, before the kids get up. Then I can focus
on getting them full of breakfast, dressed, and to school, and when I come back to my desk I’ve already got my day planned-out. It’s always felt like a good way to bookend my day, and
it leans into my “early bird” propensities2.
Over the last few years, I’ve made a habit of pulling out my phone and checking for any new work Slack conversations while on the way back after dropping the kids at school. By this
point it’s about 08:45 which is approximately the time of day that all of my immediate teammates – who span five timezones – have all checked-in. This, of course, required that I was
signed in to work Slack on my personal phone, but I’d come to legitimise this bit of undisciplined work/life-balance interaction by virtue of the fact that, for example, walking the dog
home from the school run was “downtime” anyway. What harm could it do to start doing “work” things ten minutes early?
Here. Here is where work happens (or, y’know, anywhere I take my work laptop to… but the crucial thing is that work has a time and a place, and it doesn’t include “while walking the
dog home after dropping the kids at school”).
But walking the dog isn’t “downtime”. It’s personal time. When I’m looking at your phone and thinking about work I’m actively choosing not to be looking at the
beautiful countryside that I’m fortunate enough to be able to enjoy each morning, and not to be thinking about… whatever I might like to be thinking about! By blurring my
work/life-balance I’m curtailing my own freedom, and that’s bad for both my work and personal lives!
My colleague Kyle recently returned from six months of parental leave and shared some wisdom with me, which I’ll
attempt to paraphrase here:
It takes some time at a new job before you learn all of the optimisations you might benefit from making to your life. This particular workflow. That particular notetaking strategy. By
the time you’ve come up with the best answers for you, there’s too much inertia to overcome for you to meaningfully enact personal change.
Coming back from an extended period of leave provides the opportunity to “reboot” the way you work. You’re still informed by all of your previous experience, but you’re newly blessed
with a clean slate within which to implement new frameworks.
He’s right. I’ve experienced this phenomenon when changing roles within an organisation, but there’s an even stronger opportunity, without parallel, to “reboot” your way of
working when returning from a sabbatical. I’ve got several things I’d like to try on this second chapter at Automattic. But the first one is that I’m not connecting my personal phone to
my work Slack account.
2 Mysteriously, and without warning, at about the age of 30 I switched from being a “night
owl” to being an “early bird”, becoming a fun piece of anecdotal evidence against the idea that a person’s preference is genetic or otherwise locked-in at or soon after
birth. As I’ve put it since: “I’ve become one of those chirpy, energetic ‘morning people’ that I used to hate so much when I was younger.”.
On the
flight over to Trinidad I finished reading James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes by James Acaster, which I received as part of our family’s traditional Christmas Eve book exchange. I’m a big fan of his stand-up work (and I maintain that his 2018 serialised
show Repertoire is among of the most artfully-crafted pieces of live comedy ever written) and clearly JTA recalled this fact
when giving me this book.
Many of the stories in Classic Scrapes have featured in his work before, in various forms, and I found myself occasionally recognising one and wondering if I’d accidentally
skipped back a chapter. It helps a lot to read them in Acaster’s “voice” – imagining his delivery – because they’re clearly written to be enjoyed in that way. In the first few chapters
the book struggled to “grab” me, and it wasn’t until I started hearing it as if I were listening in to James’s internal monologue that it gave me my first laugh-out-loud moment.
After that, though, it got easier to enjoy each and every tall tale told. Acaster’s masterful callback humour ties together anecdotes about giant letter Ws, repeated car crashes, and
the failures of his band (and, I suppose, almost everything else in his life, at some point or another), across different chapters, which is fun and refreshing and adds a new dimension
to each that wouldn’t be experienced in isolation.
A further ongoing concept seems to be a certain idolisation of Dave Gorman, whose Are You Dave Gorman? and Googlewhack
storytelling style was clearly an inspiration. In these, of course, a series of (mis)adventures with a common theme or mission becomes a vehicle for a personal arc within which the
absurdity of the situations described is made accessible and believable. But with James Acaster’s self-deprecating style, this is delivered as a negative self-portrayal: somebody who
doesn’t live up to their idea of their own hero, and becomes a parody of themselves for trying. It’s fun, but perhaps not for everybody (I tried to explain to Ruth why I’d laughed out loud at something but then needed to explain to her who Dave Gorman is and why that matters.)
I just finished reading Kate Manne‘s Entitled. I can’t remember where I first heard about it or why I opted
to buy a copy, but it had been sitting in my to-read pile for a while and so I picked it up last month to read over the festive period.
The book takes a pop-sci dive into research around male entitlement and the near-universal influence of patriarchal ideology. It’s an often bleak and sometimes uncomfortable read: Kate
Manne draws a line connecting the most egregious and widely-reported abuses of power by men to much-more-commonplace “everyday” offences, many of which are routinely overlooked or
dismissed. The examples she provides are a sad reminder of quite how deeply-embedded into our collective subconscious (regardless of our genders) are our ideas of gender roles and
expectations.
It’s feels somewhat chastening to see oneself in some of those examples, whether by my own assumed entitlement or merely by complicity with problematic social norms. We’ve doubtless all
done it, at some point or another, though, and we don’t make progress towards a better world by feeling sorry for ourselves. By half way through the book I was looking for action points
that never came; instead, the author (eventually) lays out what she’s doing and leaves the reader to make their own decisions.
The vast majority of the book is pretty bleak, and it takes until the final chapter before it reaches anything approximating hope (although the author refrains from classifying it as
such), using Manne’s then-imminent parenthood as a vehicle. She finishes by talking about the lessons she hopes to impart to her daughter about how to thrive in this world, which seems
less-optimistic than discussing, perhaps, how to improve the world for everybody, but is still the closest thing it delivers to answering “what can we do about this?”.
But I suppose that’s the message in this book: male entitlement is a product of our endemic patriarchy and, try as we might, it’s not going away any time soon. Instead, we should be
picking our battles: producing a generation of women and girls who are better-equipped to understand and demand their moral rights and of men and boys who try to work against, rather
than exploit, the unfair advantages they’re afforded at the expense of other genders.
That I’d hoped to come to the end of the book with a more feel-good outlook betrays the fact that I’d like there to be some kind of magical quick fix to a problem that I’ve
certainly helped perpetuate. There isn’t, and that’s a let down after the book’s uncomfortable ride (not a let down on the part of the book, of course: a let down on the part of the
world). The sadness that comes from reading it is magnified by the fact that since its publication in 2020, many parts of the Western world and especially Manne’s own USA have gotten
worse, not better, at tackling the issue of male entitlement.
But wishful thinking doesn’t dismantle the patriarchy, and I was pleased to get to the back cover with a slightly sharper focus on the small areas in which I might be able to help fight
for a better future. A good read, so long as you can tolerate the discomfort that may come from casting a critical lens over a society that you’ve been part of (arguably it could be
even-more-important if you can’t tolerate such a discomfort, but that’s another story).
(In 2025 I’m going to try blogging about the books I read, in addition to whatever else I write about. Expect an eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction, probably with a few lapses
where I forget to write about something until well after I’m deep into what follows it and then forget to say anything about it ever.)
Yesterday, I fulfilled the primary Three Rings objective I set for myself when I kicked off my sabbatical
twelve weeks ago and migrated the entire application to a new hosting provider (making a stack of related improvements along the way).
Months prior, I was comparing different providers and their relative merits, making sure that our (quirky and specific) needs could be met. Weeks beforehand, I was running a “dry run”
every four or five days, streamlining the process of moving the ~450GB1
of live data while minimising downtime. Days before the event felt like the countdown for a rocket launch, with final preparations underway: reducing DNS time-to-lives, ensuring users
knew about our downtime window, and generally fitting in a little time to panic.
I made reference on International Volunteer Day to how we needed to configure logrotate. When you’re building architecture for a system as gnarly as Three Rings, there’s
about a billion tools that need such careful tweaking2.
The whole operation was amazingly successful. We’d announced an at-risk period of up to six hours and I was anticipating it taking three… but the whole thing was completed within
a downtime window of just two and a half hours. And I fully credit all of the preparation time. It turns out that “measure twice, cut once” is a sensible strategy3.
It’s challenging to pull off a “big”, intensive operation like this in an entirely voluntary operation. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it were I not on sabbatical, but
it’d certainly have been harder and riskier.
1Three Rings‘ user data is represented by a little under 70GB of MariaDB
databases plus about 380GB of organisational storage: volunteer photos, files, email attachments, and the like. Certainly not massive by comparison to, say, social media sites, search
engines, and larger eCommerce platforms… but large enough that moving it takes a little planning!
2 Okay, a billion tools to configure? That’s an exaggeration. Especially
now: since the architectural changes I’ve put in place this week, for example, production app server builds of Three Rings no require a custom-compiled build of Nginx (yes,
this really was something we used to need).
The dots are sized based on the number of posts and broken-down by post kind: articles are blue, notes are green, checkins are orange, reposts are purple, and replies are red3.
I didn’t set out with the aim of getting to a hundred4, as I might well
manage tomorrow, but after a while I began to think it a real possibility. In particular, when a few different factors came together:
Travel’s given me more opportunity for geocaching (and, this last week, geohashing), as reflected in my copious checkin logs for that period.
Earlier this year, inspired by Clayton Errington, I came up with a process to streamline my mobile blogging
“flow”5. I now use a custom
Progressive Web App to provide a better interface for quickly posting on-the-move to one or both of this blog and my personal Mastodon account,
which I tested heavily during Bleptember.
Previous long streaks have sometimes been aided by pre-writing posts in bulk and then scheduling them to come out one-a-day6.
I mostly don’t do that any more: when a post is “ready”, it gets published.
I didn’t want to make a “this is my 100th day of consecutive blogging” on the 100th day. That attaches too much weight to the nice round number. But I wanted to post to
acknowledge that I’m going to make it to 100 days of consecutive blogging… so long as I can think of something worth saying tomorrow. I guess we’ll all have to wait and see.
Footnotes
1 Given that I’ve been blogging for over 26 years, that I’m still finding noteworthy
blogging “firsts” is pretty cool, I think
2 My previous record “streak” was only 37 days, so there’s quite a leap there.
3 A massive 219 posts are represented over the last 99 days: that’s an average of over 2 a
day!
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