Category: Coding

  • A CSS Grid refresher with Mozilla

    A CSS Grid refresher with Mozilla

    I really like CSS Grid for layouts. My challenge is that I tend not to use it all that much in my day-to-day work (I provide a fair amount of CSS support, but it tends to be focused on narrower issues), so I don’t practice it all that much. Then, when I return to CSS…

  • A curious sequence of events with Google and its YouTube recommendations

    I noticed a curious sequence of events this morning. I responded to a tweet about Donald Trump’s latest tweet where he referred to his “great and unmatched wisdom” using the Twitter app on my Android phone – I then turned to our Android TV box where we were watching YouTube videos in the YouTube app,…

  • New Automattic research on how to improve gender representation for technical roles

    New Automattic research on how to improve gender representation for technical roles

    Our team has just released a white paper titled “Trust, Growth,Inclusion: A Study ofWomen Engineers’Job-Search Priorities” that explores what motivates women and non-binary technical professionals to join companies, and what helps retain them. Better gender representation is a challenge. I’m proud of our team’s efforts to better understand this challenge, and how to meet it.…

  • Giving a 2011 MacBook Air new life with Linux

    Giving a 2011 MacBook Air new life with Linux

    I bought my wife a 11″ MacBook Air in 2011. It’s a Intel® Core™ i7-2677M CPU @ 1.80GHz (four core) laptop with 4GB of RAM. Over time the battery became less effective, and started to swell. We eventually removed it early last year, before it burst. That left my wife with her MacBook Air that…

  • My son stumbled into emacs … to play Tetris

    My son is a Tetris fan lately. He’s competing with my friend in South Africa (they’re both playing the same game, and sending boasting screenshots by WhatsApp). He came to me with his laptop (actually mine, I’ve loaned it to him) over the weekend, excited to show me how he’s playing Tetris on the MacBook…

  • Opportunistic diversions for 2019-04-17

    Opportunistic diversions for 2019-04-17

    I watched a couple interesting videos that I enjoyed, and thought I’d share: This Engadget video about the differences between DSLR and mirrorless cameras is terrific. Chris Schodt did a great job explaining both camera categories, and the advantages each type has. Well worth watching. Leonardo Da Vinci was clearly a remarkable person, and this…

  • How hard could it be to setup a Minecraft server?

    How hard could it be to setup a Minecraft server?

    My son and his friends are getting back into Minecraft, and they’ve been playing on some random server that they have some issues with. I gave it some thought, and decided that I could set up a Minecraft server for them on a Digital Ocean. I mean, how hard could this be, right? It turns…

  • Tips for being productive on GitHub

    Tips for being productive on GitHub

    I spend much of my day interacting with GitHub in one form or another as part of my day job, even though I’m not working at Automattic as a software developer. Between coding little scripts to make me more efficient, and managing or contributing to work-related projects, I use GitHub daily. This is why I…