This past weekend was WordCamp Tampa: the first of its kind, and I wanted to jot down a few takeaways, both as an attendee and as a speaker.
Category: Professional
Things that relate to my professional lives
Engineering on a whole new level
Engineering geekery ahead. You’ve been warned.
Been watching The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway about building CrossRail through London and it just puts my job and my perception of “difficult” to shame. The whole manner of undertaking civil engineering in London with its tiny streets, non-stop and uninterruptible traffic, its myriad subterranean utilities and tunnels, and historic buildings and infrastructure makes me embarrassed to put myself in the same category as them.
Some much-needed (and humourous) airtime for net neutrality
John Oliver did an excellent segment on his show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about the current legislation that cable companies are trying to boorishly shove through Congress to sideline everyday users of the Internet to favour whoever has the biggest pockets to pay for the fastest bandwidth.
This is the biggest challenge the Internet has ever faced and it must be struck down.
My experience on Trial at Automattic
Last week, I finished my Trial at Automattic. While I wasn’t successful in my bid to work for a company that I hugely admire, I appreciate the experience and insight that I was able to gain from my few weeks working with them.
How it all began
I’ve been toying with the idea of giving up engineering as my career and moving into web development full-time, as I’m enjoying it a lot more.
My plan had been to do freelancing full-time, but to give up a steady professional salary and benefits for the uncertainty of freelancing is daunting. If someone could pay my salary for 6 months while I build up my workload and client list, I could easily earn well in excess of what I make as a professional engineer. However, I haven’t had any applications for someone willing to do that for me.
So when I read that my friend Dustin Hartzler had recently landed himself a job at Automattic, it turned on a light bulb in my head. I started considering whether I wanted to work for Automattic, and the more I read, the more I wanted to jump right in (I’ll explore the benefits of working for Automattic later).
Manage your GMail inbox like a boss
I recently saw a tweet about making your GMail inbox more efficient. I thought mine was already pretty efficient, so I was intrigued as to what ideas he might have. As it happens, he had quite a few good ideas that I hadn’t put into practice, so I took his approach, slightly tweaked it for my needs and I’m loving the new setup.
Default to text (HTML) editor in WordPress
The visual editor in WordPress is generally very good and helpful, but if you have code or special formatting on some of your posts, the visual editor can sometimes screw up the formatting.
This little snippet solves that by defaulting to the text (HTML) editor every time you open a post, while retaining the ability to use the visual editor if needed.
Customer service: the right way
I’m in the process of relaunching The WP Butler and when I do, I plan on codifying my customer service charter, based on an article I recently read by a company called Fog Creek, identifying the things they do to make their customers insanely happy with their products. These had already been many of my guiding principles, but it’s good to note them down and make them “policy”, as I will be doing soon.
Shaping your workspace and environment for productivity
Jason Fried discusses how the very places that were meant for productivity and work (offices) are in fact very detrimental to our ability to perform. A lot of very good points about how to tweak your workspace (whether you work for a corporation or for yourself) to improve your productivity and ability to work.
The power of faking your body language
Amy Cuddy gives a talk that’s very encouraging to anyone who considers themselves an introvert. Just by adopting high-power poses, you can fake it until you internalise the attributes of the person you desire to be, and there will be a eureka moment, when you realise that you have become more extroverted and aren’t afraid to do things that you once were.
How to add custom buttons to TinyMCE in the WordPress editor
Some plugins add additional buttons to the WordPress editor to make life easier for functions such as entering a shortcode into the text editor without the user having to remember the syntax, or applying a specific style to a selected portion of text and this guide shows you how to do with relative ease.