I’m in an extremely rural area and I needed a phone call with my lawyer about my recent redundancy. Phone signal was very bad, so I resolved to climb a nearby hill and call him back.
“I’m at a crossroads,” I said, when I finally found enough bars to have a conversation with him.
“In your life?” he asked.
“I guess,” I replied, “But also, y’know, literally.”
The phone signal is so shit at this year’s 3Camp venue that I’ve had to climb a hill to take a call from a lawyer (whom I’m speaking to about my recent redundancy). Nice to be outdoors, though!
I’m off for a week of full-time volunteering with Three Rings at 3Camp, our annual volunteer hack week: bringing together our distributed team for some intensive in-person time, working to make life better for charities around the world.
And if there’s one good thing to come out of me being suddenly and unexpectedly laid-off two days ago, it’s that I’ve got a shiny new laptop to do my voluntary work on (Automattic have said that I can keep it).
Apparently Automattic are laying off around one in six of their workforce. And I’m one of the unlucky ones.
Anybody remote hiring for a UK-based full-stack web developer (in a world that doesn’t seem to believe that full-stack developers exist anymore) with 25+ years professional experience, specialising in PHP, Ruby, JS, HTML, CSS, devops, and about 50% of CMSes you’ve ever heard of (and probably some you haven’t)… with a flair for security, accessibility, standards-compliance, performance, and DexEx?
CV at: https://danq.me/cv
This checkin to GC6VTEG Galata Bridge #3 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
After lunch with my work team in a delightful restaurant overlooking the bridge (which I’m just-about pointing at in the attached photo) I decided to take a diversion on the route back to our coworking space to come and find this geocache, my most-Easterly yet.
The coordinates put me exactly at a likely spot, but it actually took until I’d searched three different candidate hosts before the cache container was in my hand. Signed log and (stealthily) returned to hiding place. TFTC!
With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team – whom I’ve been working with for the last year – have ever all been in the same country, all at the same time.
You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together… in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you’ll do next, and in aid of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.
Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing…
(with apologies to anybody who doesn’t know that in user interface design, a “kebab menu” is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical ellipsis)
This checkin to GCB3FAQ The Grand Bazaar fossils reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I’m visiting Istanbul to meet with colleagues, but we took some time off from our meetings and work this afternoon to come and get lost in the Grand Bazaar. While browsing the amazing diversity of stalls I found myself staring at the floors, which are made of the same kind of limestone as my kitchen floor (in which my kids love hunting for fossils!). Wouldn’t that make a great Earthcache, I thought… and it turns out it anyway is one! So I spent a little while hunting for the best fossil I could find (I’d hoped for a gastropod of some kind, but had to settle for a bivalve), and sent the answers to the CO. Fantastic stuff. TFTC! FP awarded. And, possibly, FTF!
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Last month my pest of a dog destroyed my slippers, and it was more-disruptive to my life than I would have anticipated.
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.
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.
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
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!
4 Back when I did the Blog Questions Challenge I looked at my trajectory and estimated I wouldn’t hit a hundred this year until a week later than now, so maybe I’m… accelerating?
I decided to take my meeting with my coach today in our house’s new library, which my metamour JTA has recently been working hard on decorating, constructing, and filling with books. The room’s not quite finished, but it made for a brilliant space for a bit of quiet reflection and self-growth work.
(Incidentally: I might be treating “lives in a house with a library” as a measure of personal success. Like: this is what winning at life looks like, right? Because whatever else goes wrong, at least you can go hide in the library!)
Using WordPress internally at Automattic as a productivity tool is great… until you have to call in sick three days in a row and Jetpack treats your “streak” as an “achievement”! 😅
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
WTF did I just watch?
It’s possible I don’t understand social media any more. To be fair, it’s possible that I never did.
This is something between absurd and hilarious. Aside from the 100 year plan (which is fascinating, and I keep meaning to share my thoughts on), I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be advertising. Maybe it’s trying to showcase how cool it is to work with Automattic? (It’s not… exactly like it’s depicted in the video. But I’d be lying if I said that fewer than 50% of my meetings this week have included a discussion on snack foods, so maybe we are I guess at least a little eccentric.)
I think I understand what it’s parodying. And that’s fun. But… wow. You don’t see many videos like this attached to a corporate YouTube account, do you? Kudos for keeping the Internet fun and weird, WordPress.com.
This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.
…
[a quote from Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc.] made me think a lot about the early days of Gutenberg and the huge resistance it had in the community, including causing the fork of ClassicPress. Now that we’re much further along there’s a pretty widespread acceptance of Gutenberg, and it’s responsible for the vast majority of all WP posts and pages made, however if we had taken a vote for whether it should happen or not, it probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the ground.
What’s funny is if you go back even further, using a visual WYSIWYG editor in the first place was very controversial, and many people didn’t want the classic editor brought into WordPress.
Long-term WordPresser here; I remember when 2.0 integrated TinyMCE and it was absolutely necessary to ensure that raw HTML editing remained an option, clear and up-front. Which I’m glad of: I probably hit raw HTML about once a month when I’m blogging, to this day!
I was among those who strongly resisted Gutenberg. Nowadays I use it every day! But my primary personal blog, which was already almost six years old when it migrated to WordPress 1.2 back in 2004, still uses the classic editor. I enjoy that I have the freedom to do that.
When we talk about open source meaning freedom, this is the kind of thing we mean. Years ago, I was in charge of the CMS for a major academic institution when the company behind that CMS made a gradual and concerted effort to become less-open-source. That CMS didn’t have the ecosystem and community around it that WordPress has, and so no forks took off, and so my employer got locked-in to upgrading to a new version that was mostly-closed-source and was in some ways inferior. Ugh.
(Incidentally, I got them off that CMS: they’re now using a mixture of WordPress and Drupal for most of their systems. Open source won.)
Change isn’t always good. But open source provides the freedom to embrace change in the way that suits you best.
I have A Plan for today. Step #2 involves a deep-dive into Algolia search indexing, ranking, and priority, to understand how one might optimise for a diverse and complex dataset.
So obviously step #1 involves a big ol’ coffee and a sugary breakfast. Here we go…
If the most-important lesson I learned from my sabbatical was about boundaries and my work/life balance, then the second most-important was about burnout.
If I were anybody else, you might reasonably expect me to talk about work-related burnout and how a sabbatical helped me to recover from it. But in a surprise twist1, my recent brush with burnout came during my sabbatical.
Somehow, I stopped working at my day job… and instead decided to do so much more voluntary work during my newly-empty daytimes – on top of the evening and weekend volunteering I was already doing – that just turned out to be… too much. I wrote a little about it at the time in a post for RSS subscribers only, mostly as a form of self-recognition: patting myself on the back for spotting the problem and course-correcting before it got worse!
When I got back to work2, I collared my coach to talk about this experience. It was one of those broadening “oh, so that’s why I’m like this” experiences:
The why of how I, y’know, got off course at the end of last year and drove myself towards an unhealthy work attitude… is irrelevant, really. But the actual lesson here that I took from my sabbatical is: just because you’re not working in a conventional sense doesn’t make you immune from burnout. Burnout happens when you do too much, for too long, without compassion for yourself and your needs
I dodged it at the end of November, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always be able to, so this is exactly the kind of thing a coach is there to help with!
1 Except to people who know me well at all, to whom this post might not be even remotely surprising.
2 Among the many delightful benefits to my job is a monthly session with my choice of coach. I’ve written a little about it before, but the short of it is that it’s an excellent perk.
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