I bet you didn’t know today that you wanted to play a game with Jay Z’s head eating cupcakes while his Pound Cake verse plays in the background, but you do. Use the keyboard instead of mouse and it’s way more challenging. (Also worth mentioning Childish Gambino had the best freestyle on Pound Cake.)
Somebody once told me, “Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow.” What’s the top line? It’s things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What’s our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.
— Steve Jobs
Today we hear from two Automatticians: Nikolay talks about his first open source contribution ten years ago and the path his life has taken since, and Andrea says she “can’t wipe this grin off my face” at the start of a new journey.
WordPress 4.0, code-named Benny, is now available. The response so far has been great, over 200k downloads in just a few hours. Today we celebrate, watch the counter, and tomorrow go back to work on 4.1. 🙂 For those following along at home, the 3.x series of WordPress was downloaded 300 million times.
ALS Challenge Fails
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQlvW0aFnKo
Pretty hilarious compilation of ALS Ice Bucket Challenges gone wrong. I’ve been challenged and it’s not going to happen, but did make a donation to the foundation. Really clever marketing, reminenscent of charity: water’s birthday campaigns.
Downtown Vegas Podcast
I’m a fan of Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project and try to do something with the community whenever I’m in town. On Thursday I’m going to be on the Downtown Vegas Podcast which will be filmed live at 9 pm at Inspire Theatre. Please come by if you’re in the area!
Luca Sartoni writes The Rules of A/B Testing by Tyler Durden. “1st Rule: You don’t talk about A/B Testing.”
You Can’t Tell This is 3D Rendered
Khoi Vinh writes about How 75% of the real-looking photographs you see in an Ikea catalog are actually 3d-rendered. Hat tip: Hafiz Rahman.
Posts like this are why @wordpressdotcom and @jetpack offer LaTeX / Beautiful Math support. http://t.co/rYUbyq2IpR
— george ?ephanis toots on mastodon (@daljo628) August 26, 2014
Matthew Ingram writes for Gigaom: Journalism is doing just fine, thanks — it’s mass-media business models that are ailing. Hat tip: Ben Thompson.
Tom McFarlin writes Everything Is Bloated, Nothing Is Good.
How The Sun Sees You
This video really makes you want to wear sunblock, something I haven’t been as good about this week. (Sorry Mom!) Hat tip: Sara Rosso.
You can read on the Jetpack blog and the BruteProtect blog about the company, plugin, and service joining Automattic. BTW, BruteProtect has protected this site from 1,663 attacks in the past 28 days.
Introducing plugin icons in the plugin installer, the defaults are cool (and that library would be nice to support for Gravatar) but go ahead and start making icons for your WordPress plugins. It adds a nice punch and panache to the plugin experience.
We have a great Simplenote for Mac client, and a super clean web version, but nothing first-party for Linux. If anyone is experienced with Linux desktop development and would be interested in creating something extremely minimalist like our Mac app please get in touch!
Ten WP bloggers speak out on Ferguson, a really fascinating spectrum of viewpoints from protesters to media to a blog by an anonymous police officer on duty in Ferguson.
Awesome Screenshot URL tracking and niki-bot, some pretty sketchy things going on in the Chrome extension world. Hope Google starts cleaning these up soon. BTW if you want a better screenshot tool my Automattic colleague Davide makes Blipshot which contains no tracking or spyware.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
That’s from Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long.
Peter Merel coined this version for developers:
A programmer should be able to fix a bug, market an application, maintain a legacy, lead a team, design an architecture, hack a kernel, schedule a project, craft a class, route a network, give a reference, take orders, give orders, use configuration management, prototype, apply patterns, innovate, write documentation, support users, create a cool web-site, email efficiently, resign smoothly. Specialization is for recruiters.
When I read that it definitely reminds me of some of my favorite colleagues, and something I aspire to myself even though I’m very heavily balanced toward the “lead a team” part right now in my life.
Even as technology is becoming more accessible, modern web development grows more complex. Some might look at that is discouraging, I prefer to think that no matter how far along you get you can still have a lifetime of learning ahead of you.
For interesting debate on the above, check out the c2 wiki Specialization for Insects discussion (last edited March, 2012) and also the page that says “If specialization is for insects then I’d very much like to be a humble insect.” (Last edited November, 2005. I love digging around older parts of the internet.)
The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World — I know the title sounds baity but this is the best writing I’ve read online in a while, almost like it’s from a different time.
Ethan Zuckerman writes for the Atlantic on The Internet’s Original Sin, advertising.