Category: Opinion
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Berenstein/stain Bears
Do you remember The Berenstain Bears? Do you, like millions of others, misremember them as the Berenstein Bears? I remember reading about this years ago, and now the web has caught up – people are freaking out about glitches in the Matrix, alternate realities, and other malarkey. Brace for impact… It’s always been “Berenstain”. I…
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Tone
Tone is more important than the words you use, until all you have is words. On the web, we’ve skirted tone for a long while with emoticons. 🙂 Thankfully, the wide adoption of Emoji is rescuing us from writing obscure combinations of syntactically invalid punctuation, and I think that’s a good thing. If you read as…
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Today's Software is Terrible
Are you a software developer? I am, and everyday I’m embarrassed by my profession. Every single day, I run across some website, app, video-game, program or plugin that is egregiously broken; embarrassingly broken; 5000-developers-with-six-figure-salaries-and-free-catered-lunches-and-still-can’t-get-it-right, broken. Apps on my phone, tablet, computer, tv, and car, crash constantly, sometimes resulting in actual data loss. We shoved television behind…
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Good and Evil
This past Friday, my car got hit by a motorcycle. There’s a story there, but this post isn’t about that. Rather, it’s about people’s perception of the rider. He must have been speeding. He must not have been paying attention. He must not know how to ride. None of this is actually true, though. He…
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Everything is a Variable
I like to say, that the job of a software engineer is to define variables, and honestly I don’t think it’s really much more than this. Everything in life starts off simple, and can end up as complex as you choose for it to be. This process is traditionally called “architecting” and at one point…
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The end of IPv6
The end of IPv6 will not be our fault, at least not directly. Indirectly, and in the next 25 years or so, bots will be so ubiquitous to the modern web, that bots will have bots with bots, and they will autonomously be setting up both physical & virtual servers to scale their requests in…
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"The Average Person"
I know you’ve talked about them. I know you’ve criticized them. You’ve both championed and judged them in the same breath. Today, I’m going to talk about the average person. I’m an average person, and you are too. Don’t forget this. I’m average at more things than I’m good at, actually. I’m likely average at just…
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Mother Nature's Toolbox Must Be Heavy
Running npm install for WordPress is a terrifying experience. It installs so many libraries and dependencies, it would take a lifetime to learn them all. If you’ve never had the pleasure, here’s what it looks like today: WordPress@4.5.0 /Users/johnjamesjacoby/Work/VVV/www/wordpress-develop ├─┬ autoprefixer@6.1.2 │ ├── browserslist@1.0.1 │ ├── caniuse-db@1.0.30000384 │ ├── num2fraction@1.2.2 │ ├─┬ postcss@5.0.14 │ │…
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Conflaticons
Today Twitter rebranded “Stars” & “Favorites” to “Hearts” & “Likes” https://twitter.com/twitter/status/661558661131558915 It’s so obviously a horribly conflated notion that I struggle to believe a team of thousands of people came to this as the logical conclusion to what was undoubtedly hundreds of hours of meetings & deliberation that will someday result in a tell-all novella titled:…
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Reputation
Yesterday, I tweeted about the recent Volkswagen debacle: https://twitter.com/JJJ/status/646492412098031616 It got me thinking about the WordPress community, who the major players are, and where I might fit into it all on any given day. I’ll start with Automattic and work my way across from there. Full disclosure, if you didn’t know, I worked at Automattic for…