The Grand Meetup Gitters

This past week has had me getting caught up on a lot of things, trying to be prepared to go away for a week to our annual company Grand Meetup. Last year I started working at Automattic on my Trial just shortly after everyone returned. At least one of my interviews was as they were all together. While I am very happy that this year I get to go myself and meet a large group of people who I’ve never met before, I also have a lot of anxiety about the trip.

I love traveling. Getting to see places I’ve never been, and all the people I work with are great. A few I’ve met during my team meetup the beginning of this year, but there are so many I’m really excited about getting to meet. There are going to be fun activities and interesting classes going on. The whole trip I’m confident is going to be a lot of fun. So what has me so nervous about it?

It’s not that I’ve traveled a lot, but there have been a few trips, and many of them I’ve gone on alone, not knowing anyone where I was going on the other end, but somehow this is different. Part of it is certainly the flash talk everyone will be giving. Getting up in front of people, as I’ve talked about before, is not fun for me. My presentation has been prepared and submitted for sometime though and I feel like I know how I want to present it well enough.

Even just the traveling part stresses me out. Flying is by far my favourite way to travel. I love looking out the window and seeing clouds or everything far below. The whole process still amazes me every time I do it. Airports on the other hand I don’t like. It feels like I never know where or how I’m supposed to move through. Do I take a carry on only, or check a bag? Do I have to pick up my checked bag and take it to the next leg of my flight, or does it follow me along automatically? What happens if I miss a flight? So many variables, even though I’ve never had a really bad time it still worries me.

Part of it is leaving everyone else here at home, it’s not often I’m away from Jen and the kids. Having the incredible flexibility I do with my job has allowed us to arrange our lives where we take full advantage of it. Lots of times Jen and I are just crossing paths or going opposite directions taking kids to where they need to be, or going to PTA meetings etc. So leaving everything to Jen has me stressed. Not that she can’t handle it, because I know she can, she does the lion share of organizing everything and making sure our household runs smooth anyway. But just the driving alone will be impossible to handle for one person. Luckily we have family and friends who are great about helping whenever they can, but I know it is still going to be extremely rough for her.

All week I’ve been knocking things off my to do list for before I leave. Even just little things seem to be bigger when you know they need to get done. Getting a hair cut, flu shot, car to the garage. Getting the lawn mowed, making all the phone calls you’ve been putting off. Making more arrangements for the car when you realize it needs a lot more than just an oil change.

Being an introvert and being around people, even though I enjoy it, takes me out of my comfort zone and I have to work at it. Having just gone to a conference this week and remembering how tired I felt afterwards, both because of everything going on, and because it also takes a lot out of me being in social situations like this. So realizing that I’m going to spend a week with a bunch of people, and getting to know them, makes me a bit tired just thinking about it.

All that said, I’m very excited to go on this meetup. Every interaction I’ve had with anyone at work so far has been a positive experience. Getting to meet these people and build real memories with them will make relationships stronger. One of things I’m most thankful for was getting to go, so soon after starting with Automattic, to Barcelona and meet my team. I feel it made us much closer and really solidified us as a team. Getting to do this with more people in the company will be awesome.

Knowing how much it costs, both financially and by taking people away from their regular jobs, goes to show that Automattic thinks the employees are important and that building these relationships with each other is a huge benefit. Another reason I feel so lucky to be a part of this.

Wapuu Family

I posted this originally internally at work, but it is cute so I thought I’d share it here as well.

The kids love Wapuu almost as much as I do. My newest little nephew now fits into his Wapuu onesie better so we figured we’d get a picture with everyone in their shirts. So we included our kids, my nieces and nephews and me. Jen’s shirt was locked in a room with sleeping babies so she took the picture instead of being in it.

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First Kickstarter Reward Arrived

Yesterday I received my reward for backing my first Kickstarter campaign ever. Before I found this randomly in one of my social media feeds I had been looking at a way to to get some USB outlets in my home so I didn’t need to find chargers. There always seems to be an abundance of charging cables but never the actual chargers. Looking around online and in stores I couldn’t find anything affordable enough that looked OK, and would work.

Luckily I came across the Snap Power Charger Kickstater. This seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. A small low profile outlet cover instead of something that you plugged in and stick out the existing outlet. The best thing is it requires no wiring, you simply take the old cover off and put the new one in!

During the campaign I choose a $24 option that gave me two covers. Now that I installed these two I wish I had gotten more. The project was completely funded in May 2015, and they arrived today which seems like a pretty quick turn around time to me.

The installation of these things took me literally like a minute at most. I put one in my office where I charge things frequently, and one in the living room where the kids charge things. The one mishaps I had was I tried it on an outlet where the bottom plug is controlled by a switch so we can turn on and off a lamp, or Christmas tree when it is plugged in. This caused the USB charger to only work if the switch was on too. Not a big deal, because I just swapped it to another spot instead.

snappower

WordPress.com 101

The last time I spent a whole university class up in front was in 2008 when I was a student in a C++ programming class. The assignment was to first learn then  teach the rest of my classmates about linked lists. This time instead of software engineering I was trying to engineer happiness by giving a presentation along with a question and answer session for a third year business class on using WordPress.com.

This started about a month ago at the last Refresh Annapolis Valley meetup when I met the Professor and she told me about the assignment she was giving her class. She was having them all make their own website using WordPress. She asked me then if I would come in and talk to the class, I almost said no, but glad I didn’t.

Acadia isn’t a big school and is known for it’s small intimate class sizes with lots of attention from the Instructors. My estimate for this class was about 15-20 people. I showed up a bit early and was waiting outside the class room and it just seemed like more and more people were showing up and going into the class room. It felt like hundreds were going in and I was getting more and more nervous. As it turns out when I went in and counted there were only 35 students, still more than I figured though.

The instructor, Cindy Trudel, was great though. I had let her know I’m not a fan of being up in front of people so she helped a lot introducing and leading the Q&A session. They all had their account created and site setup so I started in walking through setting up Pages & Posts and setting a static Front Page and Posts page and covered some other starting WordPress tasks. From there we went into answering specific questions they had. Most were general enough that I could answer in general for everyone, but there were a few that were more individual so I went directly to them to help.

As I started going I felt more and more comfortable and in the end I feel it went really well. It was actually really cool helping a group of people in real life instead of one at a time through my computer. Although I’m much more at easy that way, this was a valuable experience. There were certainly things I learned and will be better prepared for in the future. One small thing will be that, for something similar, I’ll start with a blank test site and a set of images all set ready to go to choose from.

If felt like to me that everyone received something out of the class today and we left it open for the possibility for me to come back in the future either with this class or a future one. Getting to be the one to introduce a group of people to something I believe in and something that they will end up being a great skill for some of them to have is a little humbling. With the web being so prevalent in almost everything in these days, having familiarity with the software that powers 24.6% of it can only be a good thing.

The All Knowing

Ah the joys of parenthood. Caile is at that age, really she’s been there for a while, where she realizes her Parents don’t know everything, but that’s OK because she has a solution.

Today she brought home her musical instrument from school that she will be playing in the band. She decided early on she wanted it to be the clarinet and that’s what she ended up with. Jen and my sister both played it when they were younger, and even though I played the trumpet she wanted nothing to do with it.

Her younger siblings were in the car and asked her if they could see it when she jumped in, she told them it wasn’t together but she would show them the pieces. Joking around with her I asked if she knew how to put it together. She said she didn’t but would figure it out.

Mom will know how to put it together, well she should, but if not that’s OK because I’ll just use YouTube.

BlogJam 2015

When I first found out about the BlogJam conference that was being planned for Halifax I was very excited. Reading about many of my co-workers who travel to WordCamps and other conferences related had me a little envious. Just the lead up to the conference is what lead me to discover the new WordPress meetup that I attended last month. Allison, one of the meetup organizers, presented at at the conference and her involvement let me to the meetup.

Getting myself to a WordCamp is still something I really want to get to, but having a conference solely related to blogging it is amazing. Getting to interact with other people who are passionate about the same thing as me is a wonderful experience.

The day started right from the beginning on a high note. A friend from University and I made arrangements to travel with each other to Halifax together. Alex is really one of the smartest, kindest people I have ever met and it was so nice to get to chat with him and his life.

For a first year conference I was extremely impressed with how the whole day went. The organizers did a phenomenal job planning and executing it. The presenters they arranged, including the keynote speakers were all top notch. I found it hard to choose between the sessions, but the ones I ended up going to were all informative and well done.

The big thing I took away from the conference as a whole was that it is good for me to take a step back and look at the big picture sometimes. Because of my job it is easy for me to get caught up in the tools that people use to really get to their end goal. While the WordPress software itself I feel the best tool available to do that, the people using it don’t care so much about the tool as they do about getting their message out.

That’s the best part about WordPress, is it’s more than just the software it’s the mission behind it, to democratize publishing. Everyday I get to assist people with that mission, it just so happens that it’s by helping them use WordPress.

Week Seven Summary

This past week has been birthday central for us. We’ve celebrated so many birthday’s it’s crazy. I believe there has been 7 birthday celebrations I’ve been a part of. Some of those are duplicates for people where we had a small get together and then an actual party, but it still caused me to give in and eat more treats than I normally would have.

This week I didn’t track my eating either. It started right at the beginning of the week with the snacks, so I though I would feel better not tracking it. For the most part I stayed good though and when I did snack only had small portions. Besides the extra treats I still did good with the rest of my eating. My runs also went really well.

Five days of running with one day being short but fast, then a few quick 5k days. Saturday I did my last long run before the Valley Harvest 10k which is next weekend. Figured I would push it for distance instead of speed, but keep the pace at what I want to do for the race. 11k was pretty manageable but I figured that was far enough. I’m glad I stopped because my legs were pretty sore later on.

Results:

Last week: 197lbs
Now: 195lbs
Lost: 2lbs

Even with my treat eating I was still able to drop a bit of weight which is great news. I’m 10lbs from the original goal I set for myself but I still have one last week before the race to lost as much as I can. I’m going to try to eat as well as I can but for running I plan to only do probably three 5k runs. Then take a couple days off before the race.

We’ll see where I end the eight weeks in terms of weight. Even after these eight weeks are over I’ll still keep working because my true ideal weight I’d like to be at is 175lbs. That’s 20 more than where I am right now.

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Best Note Taking App

Since early in my computer use I’ve used a basic text editor to leave notes for myself. With years of Windows use it used to be Notepad. I’d have text files saved in directories all over my computer. This obviously didn’t scale very well and it was hard to find anything again when you needed it later on.

Eventually I got a little better and would move them into all one directory and try to name them descriptively so I could track them later. Still I’d resort to the command prompt and the findstr command to search the directory for files with the search word(s) in them. It worked, but not real pretty.

This also didn’t lend well for any sort of collaboration. It would still mean emailing back and forth and then updating text files on my computer. Then accessing files when I was using other computers became a pain. I’d run FTP software and VNC software so I could log into my computer at home to view things. This worked pretty well, but still ideal and there was a lot of overhead involved.

When I started being more mobile and having a smart phone it would be real nice to be able to have all these notes on the go. Many times I would email myself something just so I’d be able to access it later easily from my phone. Then I started testing out different Note apps. I tried a few but was never really satisfied.

Then when I started investigating Automattic I found Simplenote. This was almost exactly what I was looking for. It makes it effortless for me to sync my notes from any of my devices. There are apps for Mac, iOS, Android, and of course the web app. No matter what I’m using I always have my latest notes. I can easily share notes with others so that we can each edit them and see the others changes. I can search, tag, and roll back history of notes if I need to.

For me the one thing that is missing is a list function where I can have a list an easily mark things off as they are done. This is usually used for shopping lists that my wife and I can each edit and add things to then cross them off as they are picked up. I realize that something like this would take away a bit from the “simple” aspect of things, but it’s something I use all the time and would love to have it built in my favourite note taking app.

Each of the apps has just recently been updated so there is no better time to give them a try.

I Will Never Stop Learning

This afternoon I was came up with an idea of something I wanted to do with an internal tool at work. It didn’t quite do what I was looking for unfortunately, but I wasn’t sure if that was the case at first.

Chatting with the main developer Timmy Crawford on the project we realized it didn’t work, but that it could be a good thing to have. I’ve been wanting to learn how to work with Github for some time but just never have. Timmy took the time on, my whim, and helped me through making my first pull request making the needed changes and getting the new feature live. Thanks so much!

In the end it was only a few lines of code, and it took a few tries to get it right, but I now have code I contributed to running in production that is used by most of the people I work. Even if they don’t use the feature we added, it’s there available to them and that’s a cool feeling.

The project was also in CoffeeScript which I have never written in before, so that was a learning curve. It turns out CoffeeScript doesn’t like ternary operators with the question mark colon syntax. That was one of the tries that didn’t work 🙂 So x = test ? a : b; needed to be x = if test then a else b;

All in all it was a really fun evening, even if I did get a bit of dirty looks from Jen because I was on my laptop so long when we have house guests over, ooopps.

New Project Idea

It’s really strange how when things get really busy that’s when I want to come up with new projects to take on. Recently a friend opened a new business. It’s Racers Rec Room which is basically going to be a place you can book parties and race on a large six lane slot car track.

It’s a lot of fun and they go pretty darn fast. The main downfall that he is having right now is that the lap counter and computer system he is using for games is a little bit old. It was a DIY setup that he purchased but it is running on old Commodore 64 system. Not that it wasn’t fun to see it in action and reset and load the software up for each race, but it would be a fun project to rebuild too.

The hardware setup wouldn’t really be that difficult and it would be a great reason to experiment with an Arduino system which is something I’ve wanted to mess with for a while. I figure that would be a relatively easy way to hook up the lap counter circuitry to a usb input and then I could play with the software part.

Does anyone have any good tutorials out there that would help point me in the right direction to getting started with something like this? What Arduino package would you start with?