Well it’s been a while, but I’ve just pushed a 3.0 release of Keyring.

I worked as a full stack engineer/developer for many years before going into more leadership type positions, where an understanding of the business itself became much more important than specific product experiences, features, or codebases. Along that journey I’ve needed to learn a lot of acronyms and concepts that …

I used to have Wink set up, managing some smart home devices throughout our house. I liked it because the app UI was quite nicely done, and it seemed to be compatible with “everything”. I had even upgraded from their version 1 hub, to the version 2. But then a few months ago they decided (somewhat out of the blue) that …

I’ve been searching for years for the “perfect tool” to help me take notes, organize ideas, and keep track of all the tasks I need to do. I’ve also been deeply obsessed with lists forever. At some point I came across Workflowy, which I quite liked. I don’t remember why, but I then discovered and switched over to …

COVID-19 (aka coronavirus) has many companies suddenly experimenting with remote work for the first time. I tweeted yesterday that unfortunately people are likely to have a pretty rough time due to the rushed nature of the experiment, and some folks asked if I could expand on that, so here we are. There are already a …

Constantly-changing priorities and surprise projects erode team morale and leave everyone unsure of if they’re working on the most important thing, or if they’ll ever get to finish anything. While being adaptable and flexible is critical for most teams, it’s always important to have some kind of roadmap and approach to …

Before we get into any details, let me just get this out of the way — I absolutely love this thing, and giggle every time I get to use it. It makes no sense, I know, but here we are.

Since moving to Colorado, I’ve been lucky enough to get out mountain biking pretty frequently. I love it. On some rides you’re just trying to get up or down the mountain in one piece, but on some rides you get good time to think quite deeply. On a recent ride I was rolling around (pun intended, you’re welcome) some …

Yesterday I released new versions of both Keyring and the Keyring Social Importers packages, containing a bunch of updates and new additions. If you’re already using them, you should have update notices in wp-admin. If you’re not yet, then download them at the links above, or search for “keyring” in wp-admin under …

After drooling over it for months at Costco, I picked up a bundle package with a DJI Mavic Air back in November. I’ve now flown it a fair bit, and wanted to write up some observations on it.

Loved these thoughts from the outgoing Chief Data Scientist of the White House:

To ring in 2019, I’m changing this blog’s theme to Twenty Nineteen, the new default WordPress theme, designed and primarily created by my excellent colleague, Allan Cole (check out his music, published as The Stuyvesants, they’re groovy).

After our wedding, and cleaning everything up, we had just another day or two at home before heading off on our honeymoon. We decided to go to Japan, since neither of us had ever been there, and we both really wanted to go. It was a really amazing trip, even though it was brutally hot and humid at the time of year we …

Erika and I finally made it official and got married this year. We were legally married on July 5th (at the courthouse), and then we celebrated with friends and family properly on July 7th. Here are some pics from the week.

I had to chuckle recently when I realized just how complex some of the systems in my life are, even if I rarely think about the details.

This year, for the third year in a row, I participated in the Fjällräven Classic USA here in Colorado. Read about the 2016 USA Fjällräven Classic and the 2017 USA Fjällräven Classic.

I bought a bike!

Looking for a simple daypack for quick adventures? Me too. I’ve been using a Geigerrig Rig 1210 (looks something like this one ) for a while, but found it to be a little too small, awkwardly configured, and generally just not really what I wanted. After weighing some options, I ended up with a decision between 2 packs: …

In 7072886 I added a first swing at a YouTube Service definition to Keyring. It’s based heavily on the Google Analytics one that was recently submitted via PR. It’s not part of an official release yet. I’m curious about enabling people to import the videos they publish on YouTube into a WordPress install though, as …

I just released version 1.9 of the Keyring plugin for WordPress.

I travel a fair bit for work, and have historically let it affect (read: completely stop) any sort of fitness routine I might have going at home. Normally I try to get to the gym 2-3 times a week, and do whatever is the WOD at my CrossFit (Sprint) gym. When traveling, I just let it slide normally, and then try to get …

Yesterday, I received my new iPhone X. I thought I’d post some notes on the painful process that has been switching over to it. Might be time to start experimenting with a Pixel.

I’m sad to hear that Ted Rheingold has lost his fight with cancer, and died on Monday. Through a pretty random turn of events, Ted was one of the very first people I met in the SF technology “scene”, back in 2005, after I moved to San Francisco. I attended the first BarCamp, and didn’t have a good way to get there. In …

A few weeks ago, Erika and I joined some friends on the Colorado River for a repeat of a trip we took last year.

This week, I’ve been roaming the Colorado wilderness with 250 of my closest/unknown friends, participating in the second annual Fjällräven Classic, USA. I participated in the inaugural event last year, which conveniently fell during my 3-month sabbatical from work. At the time, I said that no matter what else was going …

I recently picked up an iPad Pro (9.7″), along with the Apple Pencil and a Logitech keyboard/case. I’m trying the package out as an alternate work configuration, and so far am quite enjoying it. It’s also good to force me to test more of our software from a mobile perspective.

A week after our first 14er, we decided that we wanted to not only hit another one, but do a combo, and go for 2 in one day. Grays and Torreys are in the Front Range, and pretty accessible as long as you’ve got a high-clearance (preferably 4WD) vehicle, which luckily, we now do!

Last weekend, Erika and I (along with friends, Kelly and Emi) climbed our first 14er! We picked Bierstadt since it’s in the Front Range (easy to get to from Denver), is supposed to be relatively easy, and trail reports/weather indicated it should be pretty clear. We weren’t alone; there were a ton of people up there …

At the Fjällräven Classic, I was a little smitten with the Kajka 75 backpack which I saw a bunch of people carrying around. As it turned out, we got a discount as participants in the Classic, so a few days later I found myself the proud new owner of a Kajka, and in need of a backpacking trip to “break it in”. Since I …

In amongst all of my own trips during my sabbatical, I was flipping through Outside Magazine (a really great periodical, BTW) and saw an ad for something called the “Fjällräven Classic “. As the page linked indicates, it was to be a 20 mile backpacking trip, spaced over 3 days (2 “half” days and a full day, and …

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As chance would have it, in the weeks leading up to my Colorado River canoe trip, I managed to hitch onto another canoe trip. This one was a little more “extreme”. A group of us were going to Minnesota for a friend’s wedding, and so the plan was to get there early, drive up to the Minnesota Boundary Waters, and head …

This was my first ever canoe-camping adventure, and actually crossed something off my “bucket list” — going on a multi-day canoe-camping trip. I’ve kayaked a fair bit before, but have only been canoeing once or twice, and only on lakes, so in very calm water. For this trip, I was lucky enough to just tag along on …

When we bought our house in Denver, we intentionally got one that didn’t really need any work done on the house itself. That didn’t entirely work out (yay emergency bathroom remodeling!), but most of our attentions have been focused on our yard, and particularly our back yard. We wanted a “livable” space, that we could …

Almost 2 years ago, I wrote about how the future of WordPress needed to be a REST-based API, with a JavaScript client on top of that. There were even public rumors that, gasp, we were thinking about porting WordPress to Node.js. Well, while that’s not exactly true, it’s closer to the truth than a lot of people probably …

During our last team meetup, we had a “guac-off”, where 2 of us made our own recipes of guacamole, and then everyone “blind taste tested” (aka devoured them, without knowing who made which one), and we voted. Mine won! In the end it was the texture (more chunky) that won it for me. Someone asked for the recipe, and …

I’ve been thinking about home automation a bit recently, and I realized that what I want as a big part of a system is some sort of generic presence-system. I’m imagining something along the lines of:

Benchmade Volli on top, Kershaw Blur on bottom.

Image shows leather hand-pad, copper-tipped pressure flaker, small stone (Jasper?) arrow head and larger glass/beer bottle arrow head (both made by me, today).

As a developer, I’m a huge fan of “red changesets”; when you get to delete more code than you add. Less code means less maintenance, less potential for bugs, security problems, etc. Today I got to “red changeset” the plugins powering this website because I realized I could just go ahead and delete the plugin I was …

I’ve long wanted to be able to do some simple, operated-powered searches within WordPress (especially relevant in a project I’m working on at Automattic ). After a conversation with Allen, where he wanted to do the same thing, I figured I’d just whip up a quick plugin to see how hard it’d be. Turns out the answer is …

Through some lucky scheduling, I was able to attend both LevelUp Con and WordCamp Saratoga in a single trip. I spoke at WordCamp about how to build a quick Backbone.js application which used WordPress as the backend (interfacing via the REST API ). I thought my talk went OK, although I didn’t love it to be honest, and …

Last week, I attended the first ever LevelUp Con (which WordPress.com sponsored) in Saratoga Springs, New York. I was really impressed with the event, which was organized by the crew at Mad Glory to help draw attention to upstate New York’s tech scene, and to expand people’s horizons and help them cross-train a bit.

I just got back from seeing Phantogram play at the Ogden Theater here in Denver, CO, and they blew my mind. It was definitely one of the stand out shows that I’ve seen recently, which was extra impressive for a Monday night, at a venue I can walk to from my apartment, for $25.

I’ve been asked a few times recently what programming language I’d learn if I was just starting out. Right now, the answer is definitely JavaScript, and here’s why:

DISCLAIMER: Personal thoughts only, based on what I’m seeing around the web over the last few years.

Today is kind of exciting, although it’s been a long time coming so it’s not much of a surprise for me Today Scott Berkun, the author of books such as The Myths of Innovation, and Confessions of a Public Speaker, releases his latest book, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work.

Back in April, this blog celebrated 10 years of existence, and it’s been almost five years since the theme on this site changed. Yesterday I decided to just go ahead and flip the switch on something I’ve been working on here and there since late last year. It’s a complete new, very experimental theme that I call …

Yesterday, I released version 1.5 of Keyring, and version 1.4 of the Keyring Social Importers bundle for WordPress. This update moves the Social Importers away from using a postmeta value (keyring_service) and introduces a new taxonomy that keeps track of where posts were imported from. It’s optimized towards …

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Aim:

Fortnightly articles/reports posted by Monsieur Guru Nielsen himself. Some of these are pretty good, personally I think some of them are just plain stupid.

Just kidding, but I got some details back from Lisa C, and she appears to have some very specialised requirements for her system. I have suggested that it might be better if we work together to develop a “base system” which would include the complete logging functionality, and then she can customise and/or extend the …

After joining the AIfIA (and paying the membership fee), I have been somewhat disappointed with the response I received from the CELIA idea.

Well, I thought they were silent, turns out I just needed to put the idea of CELIA to the whole AIfIA membership to get a response.

Lisa Chan from Stanford emailed me, wanting to know if we could work together on building a search log analyzing system. I emailed her back with a stack of the details of stuff that I was planning and haven’t heard back… I wonder why not? Maybe she’s taken my ideas and is off building it without me?