Following Ian’s lead, I too am speaking at WordCamp San Francisco this year! This will be my second time attending and first time speaking at the annual WordPress conference, so needless to say I (like Ian) am super-excited about it!
The details of my session haven’t been officially released, but you can bet the farm it will be something totally awesome about BuddyPress or bbPress.
There’s a reason why Google chose circles for its new Google + social graph, and it isn’t just because it’s a clever name. If you search Google’s archive of images for the phrase “social graph” every single relevant image that comes up portrays relationships as being circular.
In the screen shot above, it’s clear that we humans seem to naturally illustrate our relationships as being… rounded. We live our lives constantly juggling these relationships with friends, partners, family, and colleagues in an intricate network that is unique to us. What better way to depict these predictably random dynamics than with a shape that has absolutely no bias towards any direction or alignment – the circle.
Up until now, we’ve been forced to map these relationships within rigid digital constructs built by developers (see: me) to make it as easy as possible to manage that data as it scales into the millions of relationships.
It’s easy to lump people into classes and demographics and groups and categories because we receive (false) positive reinforcement from doing it, and quantifying these relationships by putting them into boxes makes them feel real.
You are my: [ ] Friend [ ] Family [ ] Pet [ ] Dinner
Since the first time someone drew a recognizable picture of someone else, having something we can go back to and look at and touch and say “Yeah, that person exists and we are important to each other!” has been an evolutionary significance in our development that technology hasn’t been able to properly convey quite yet. With every emerging social platform that comes around we get one step closer to translating the complexities of our relationships in ways that actually make sense, beyond being friends and followers.
If nothing else, Google + (and Circles specifically) is a reminder that our lives are ever-changing and the people we know now and will meet tomorrow don’t belong in any rigid box. If you are my friend, I appreciate my judgmental classification of you in my life just a wee bit more today than I did yesterday.
Interesting read by Ed Bury on preventing BuddyPress sign-up spam using a combination of a honeypot, random hashes, and blacklisted domain names.
Today was a very awesome day for me; it was my first full day as a Code Wrangler with Automattic, Inc.
First, I’m really excited about the opportunity to work with such amazing, talented, and ulta-cool people on a daily basis. Over the past 2 years I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a fair number of Automattic employees at various WordCamps across the US. They all do-what-they-love and love-what-they-do, and to say that this has been a goal of mine would be an understatement; it’s a dream job come true.
Second, I’ll continue to support my existing WordPress plugins. If you use anything that I’ve written or helped develop, that will keep on keeping-on. Regarding BuddyPress and bbPress, those are still very much full-steam-ahead, as well as some other really neat implementations of both of those projects.
Third, I’ll be available for speaking opportunities at more WordCamps and conferences. When I was working freelance I really needed to budget my time and finances months in advance, and consider the out-of-pocket cost to my family and my business for each individual trip. That made it really hard to cherry pick which ones to visit since the decision was directly linked to how much gas I had in the car and how full the refrigerator was. Now I’ll be able to be more involved with the community again, not just at WordCamps, but the support forums, IRC, and other various conferences (which as a brief aside is something I’ve really been missing lately.)
Lastly, I’m appreciative of everyone that I’ve met in the WordPress community. The past few years have been amazing, and words can’t express how excited I am for what the future holds for me at Automattic.
One of my most fantastical clients gave BuddyPress some props on their website, and I thought it was probably the most adorable thing any of my clients have done, so naturally I’m sharing it here.
Check out Friday’s blog post over at WeHeartThis.
Thanks Stef and Tyna! You’re the bestest!
I’m not really a business-man kind of guy. I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around the economic logistics of running a zillion dollar corporation, so I’ll preface this to say that I can’t really speak from that angle with first hand experience. What my perception of that kind of business is though, is cut-throat and viscous with a side of watch-your-back. Considering I’m generally a laid back, go with the flow kind of person (unless I’m sitting in traffic) it’s pretty natural and obvious that I’m just not cut out for that line of work.
What has worked pretty well for me though, is open source development. I think because it has that whole ‘pay it forward’ type of mentality to it… and because I get to prove myself everyday to my friends, my peers, and my clients and colleagues. It benefits not only me, but the people that I work and play with, to do a good job. I’m rewarded with natural thank-yous and random pats-on-the-back just for doing something that I would be doing anyhow, which lets me ‘make my own bed’ so to speak. It’s like having a commission based salary, except without the sales pitch and the getting ripped off by the sales guy.
I’m blessed and fortunate to be able to do what I do and be able to pay the bills with it. It’s a luxury that I’m not always sure I deserve yet, but I take advantage of the opportunities doing my best not to take them for granted any step of the way. Because of the WordPress community, I’ve met amazing people that I call my friends, even if we’ve physically met 3 times. I’ve gotten to work a lot on BuddyPress, and will be putting some efforts into bbPress now, all of which I’m happy and proud to be able to say that I am a small part of.
All of this, isn’t my doing.
If it wasn’t for the GPL, I wouldn’t have any of it. None of it would be possible.
If I wasn’t able to see other peoples work and reapply it for the task at hand, I would never have been able to learn LAMP development in the first place. The first thing I noticed is that open source developers are typically very generous, providing copious amounts of insight and example code with out asking for a penny in return. The general rule, of course, is that you credit the original author for their assistance, even if it was in a semi-anonymous fashion. I generally like to drop a comment in their blog if they have one thanking them for their help, but I digress…
This is all what made giving props cool.
Let me just say, that NOT crediting people for their help is usually uncool. I am of the opinion that anyone with a shred of moral fiber should thank the people that helped them get where they are. But in the open source development world, having a link in your footer to the engine that runs your site, is something you’re proud of; having a commented line of code inside yours that credits the original author is something you’re proud to do, and there’s a few reasons why I think that is:
I know that the GPL is a legal document that is meant to protect the rights and abilities of the developers that use it. Going back to the business-man thing, I can honestly say that in my beginnings (and sometimes even recently) I did not comprehend exactly what the GPL was or what it meant to believe in it as strongly as I do on this day. To me, today, the GPL is something that protects me and my rights as much as it is something that lets me safely distribute what I do for others to use, reuse, and share however they see fit in a respectable and ethical fashion.
The kicker about all this, is my feelings won’t be hurt if I don’t get ‘props’ even if it’s in the spirit of the GPL to provide them; even if it’s written in the license that you need to obey the original license. If I never get a thank you, and never get recognition for what I do, and my code shows up somewhere without a direct credit to me, I won’t even be mad… it isn’t something I need or want… but I will appreciate it. Like most things in life that can be appreciated, if they go totally unappreciated for too long… if they are used and abused to point of an obvious injustice being committed, be it moral, ethical, legal, or otherwise… there are and should be repercussions for that kind of behavior.
So… in short (but also very long), the GPL made props cool. It did that by giving everyone a perpetual and reciprocal way of helping each other get things done in a way that makes sure everyone is appreciated, everyone is treated fairly, and everyone gets recognized for their hard work and dedication. If you use a GPL licensed snippet of code, or an icon that someone has made available, or use open source software, by recognizing the hard work that went into those things, you’re silently appreciating and respecting the people that help make the internet awesome, and they do appreciate it. I know I do, and I appreciate all of you too. 😀
In celebration of my new iPad and the soon to be released BuddyPress 1.2.4, I put together a few BuddyPress iPad wallpapers; yours to download for free.
