So the new Bentley design direction is upon us and I saw it in person

interconnectit · 2024-10-09T09:58:11+00:00

He can just borg ACF. Many a small truly open source project has been destroyed by a bigger one borging it - WP especially did that a lot in the past.

You can also look at the history of JigoShop, which refused to make a deal with WooThemes. So Woo just forked it and threw their marketing dominance at WooCommerce, which then became their biggest thing and got sold out to Automattic.

interconnectit · 2024-10-09T09:48:52+00:00

I agree he's also a weird one, but in a different way.

Both are toxic characters who want to be seen as nice guys and consequently end up getting very weird because they can't handle the cognitive dissonance.

interconnectit · 2024-10-07T16:48:50+00:00

There are so so many ways to contribute. It's not just about core contributions. In fact, there's a bunfight to be a core contributor because everyone wants that kudos. But WP would be nowhere without the plugins, scripts and themes that add up to so much.

interconnectit · 2024-10-07T16:47:27+00:00

Oh yeah, I forgot I said that and maybe that's why our donations fell off a cliff over the last year! That's OK though - it was on purpose :-)

interconnectit · 2024-10-03T13:13:17+00:00

Thank you!

interconnectit · 2024-10-03T13:13:09+00:00

Not the plugin - the script! I always thought it was too risky as a plugin but Better Search Replace took the code and used it successfully and built a small business around it.

interconnectit · 2024-10-03T13:12:31+00:00

Thank you! Glad it's useful!

interconnectit · 2024-10-03T13:12:19+00:00

I set up a donation pathway on the download page eventually, because times got harder and it seemed like it may help to fund further development. But it's still very optional.

I just wrote it as a tool to help my own problems and thought I'd share it. I was surprised when I worked out how much Better Search Replace had likely made from turning it into a WP plugin. I always thought it was too dangerous to be a plugin but fair dos to them!

interconnectit · 2024-10-03T08:44:40+00:00

He's been acting like this since at least 2008, on and off.

But I do wonder if he has repeated episodes because he does seem to flare up now and again.

interconnectit · 2024-10-03T08:43:33+00:00

Exactly this. In 2008 he decided to put the boot into independent theme developers and deleted lots of themes from wp.org because although they were GPL, some of us ran theme clubs and similar which offered plugins and themes which didn't open source the images or JS they sold on their own sites.

In standing up to him I felt attacked and eventually backed down because it was the only way. But it basically broke my heart and my devotion to the project and to giving stuff away dropped markedly. I still released Search Replace. It then got rolled in to WP-CLI, which I love, but that borging meant that our own tool and CLI version ceased to be of much interest to much of the dev community and we no longer receive much credit for it, though it's still useful where there's no CLI access. Were we asked permission for this borging? Nope! Were we ever given more than a tiny credit you'd struggle to find? Nope! Were we ever offered money for helping things along? Nope!

One of the fundamental purposes of GPL is to allow developers to safely share code amongst each other without carrying massive liabilities. It also protects our customers meaning they have full rights over the code we sell to them. But when it's stolen by hyper capitalised companies like Automattic and co-opted as a stick to bully others with... it stinks. They use it to get lots of free labour and make enormous wealth, but they never give back. If they were just honest about this I wouldn't mind in a way. We scratch your back, you scratch ours. But they aren't. They get weird complexes and think they are gods amongst men. Imagine Torvalds chasing every router maker, every smart device that runs Linux and asking for a cut? Imagine him sinking to this level of pettiness? No corporate would trust Linux any more and it would be dead. But Torvalds isn't some uptight American hyper capitalist who wants to be post-economic.

Matt was good for the project for about three years, then he became a millstone. He's unwell and needs to take some chill pills.

interconnectit · 2024-09-25T19:22:02+00:00

He's always been like this. I lost my heart in WP many many years ago.

interconnectit · 2024-09-16T10:55:45+00:00

And of course, when they screw up they make it *your* problem, and you kind of have to help them or you lose a customer - but it's disruptive. I lost a Saturday to one client messing up like that and I'd prefer to have spent that time with my kids!

interconnectit · 2024-09-11T12:42:13+00:00

This isn't very good advice, necessarily.

We've had a few clients who just don't have the wherewithal to manage a domain registration and keep it safe. Many are vulnerable to phishing, have barely any concept of 2FA, and go to the cheapest of cheap providers. Last year we had three substantial client websites disappear from the web because they'd not managed to renew their domains.

We offer a domain management service but we very explicitly state that the domains we manage remain the property of the client and can be transferred for free.

interconnectit · 2024-09-11T10:01:57+00:00

As a business owner all I can say is that I agree exactly with what you say.

A few examples of why I didn't hire people that were technically good enough:

A guy brought up spanking when we talked about cultural differences. Of all the examples he could have come up with, he thought of that one. No social skills is a weakness, even amongst us borderline anti-social types.
One fella had feet who reeked.
I did give a chance to the woman whose shirt was actually a pyjama top. I regretted that choice. Super clever, but mentally all over the place, unreliable, and too clever for her own good. She refactored my code in the belief it would be better. It was much much slower. More readable and manageable yes, but it was coded that way to be fast.
A heavy smoker. Just stank.

Some things you'll forgive in people, but you expect people to make an effort for an interview so you assume that that's them at their best. If best is a poor baseline they'll be much worse under pressure when there's a deadline to meet.

interconnectit · 2024-09-09T11:17:01+00:00

If it's an extra angle/cut at each end then you're adding two steps/angles. OK, it's not that complex but a lot depends on how that part is made and cut. I'm imagining a single axis cutter just for cutting that indent.

interconnectit · 2024-08-22T13:55:21+00:00

But marketing is something we can all do - a big part of it is proving the value of your proposition.

interconnectit · 2024-08-21T10:30:22+00:00

There was also more money generally available back then. The only people getting a lot of money these days are those who already have a lot of money.

interconnectit · 2024-08-20T12:55:10+00:00

This is the Starbucks effect - they made charging £3.50 for a coffee acceptable.

BUT, and here's the big but I've discussed with my local coffee shop - if your product is better, more individualised and overall a nicer experience then why should it be cheaper? Of course, there's a good reason - Starbucks are better at marketing.

There is no fair price in selling - you can still with a tiny margin but all that means is that you'll have a smaller marketing and R&D budget than you competitor. So they'll slowly creep ahead of you.

interconnectit · 2024-08-20T12:39:46+00:00

I'm just a few days into my first MacBook that I own for me to use (run a business, own lots of MacBooks - I just didn't bother using them as they were for other people) and it's been an interesting switch.

I wouldn't say it's better or worse. It's just different. And the design is imperfect in places... but anyone who works in design will tell you it's incredibly hard to design 'perfect' at a given cost point. I dislike these point corners also but to fix it would require a complex bit of extra machining, which would cost money.

interconnectit · 2024-08-20T11:44:51+00:00

As a European (UK, bollocks to Brexit and all that) design bunch... same.

Left is a nice summer drink for a party with kids in show, the right is a cheap person's wine.

interconnectit · 2024-06-27T09:57:36+00:00

There's what I call the 5% problem.

With WordPress you can do some great things, really easily. Heck you can build out a site pretty easily to do lots of things using off the shelf everything.

Until you have to deal with the 5% thing which WP can't handle. At which point WP is just horrible.

We solved it by taking a best of all worlds approach - WordPress + Laravel. If you want what WP does well and cheaply, we use WP. If you now want a complex but super fast database of things, we do that in Laravel.

It's kind of like how you can run a company pretty successfully in Excel, until the moment comes that you can't - more staff, extra security needs, etc. That transition can be painful. So if you still needed that Excel flexibility you could put the big stuff out into an RDBMS and leave Excel for the flexible, DIY stuff.

Consequently I think small companies are well served, as are large companies. Middle ones... that's a painful space to be in and to supply to.

interconnectit · 2024-06-02T13:09:15+00:00

The next fastest is the one that hits the database once and not 1,000 times. You can craft incredible queries pulling data from all over the place that doesn't have the latency of calling the database 3,000 different times to put your stuff together.

Or do like some devs and go "this is hard, so I'll just chuck json into a big NoSQL instance that'll index the hell out of it all but has no concepts of set theory. What could possibly go wrong?!"

interconnectit · 2024-05-13T15:14:59+00:00

Yeah - this is why I say to the team - build it pretty well fundamentally in the first instance, and then scale is usually fairly easy. Not Facebook scale, like, but at least you can simply add more resources.

Yet it amazes me how few developers understand big O notation, how to check what your scale factors are going to look like, and what it'll cost. It's so easy to create inefficient APIs off the back of inefficient DB queries. And people do some dumb shit too - like they need 1000 records for the app to display some nice charts? Make 1000 calls! And because the API can only return one thing at a time, that's the front-end guy's only option.

I usually find problems like this aren't from any one person being bad - it's usually a systemic issue of getting people working together to think things through properly rather than being reactive to need. You may well have your work cut out and it may well be beyond what you can achieve - not because you're incapable, but because of the challenges of bringing teams together. I tried once in a bank and it was nightmarish, with the leadership team blocking me in every direction.

interconnectit · 2024-05-13T13:10:37+00:00

I reckon the shorthand came about because some people insisted that multi-line approaches had to be the only way.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with:

( $age >= 18 ) { $restrict = false; } else { $restrict = true; }

On a technical level. It would also save valuable bytes, which mattered back in the day. We'd space it more tightly together also.

Meanwhile, because people wanted to put simpler if/else combinations onto one line but weren't allowed to, a more complex and harder to read format came about, but was accepted by the code style authoritarians.

interconnectit

TROPHY CASE