Jane Kim for School Board

Asides

One of the people I had the pleasure of meeting while in San Francisco was Jane Kim, who’s running for school board there. If you’re voting in that area in this upcoming election I would highly recommend checking out where she stands on the issues and keep Jane Kim in mind when you visit the polls. If you get a chance to meet her before the election you’ll also get to see what a neat person she is, if not you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Image Title Plugin

Asides

Coldforged has an entry title image replacement plugin that lets you have titles like mine (done previously) that also has word-wrapping. I think I saw an approach somewhere (was it b2evo?) that actually broke each word into a separate image. For me the length limitation isn’t a limitation as much as a sanity check, if I’m writing titles so long it breaks my site I should probably shorten up a bit. I’ve also found caching isn’t worth it, every title here has been completely dynamic for about a year now.

Cowen Life Lessons

Asides

Sriram Krishnan calls Tyler Cowen one of the best talent spotters.

I take a few life lessons from Tyler, who I consider a mentor even though we’ve spent, at most, dozens of minutes together in the past several decades. (Don’t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work!)

  1. He has blogged consistently on Marginal Revolution since 2003. As he learns he shares, and that’s a lighthouse beacon attracting smart people around the world with similar interests. So the lesson is: blog!
  2. He keeps himself open to engagement, with his email address being public. He reads and responds to his own emails.
  3. He treats everyone with with respect. I was a kid no one had heard of when I met him at an economics conference in 2003, but he spoke to me with the same respect and attention he gave to Milton Friedman, who was also there.

His advice to me was simple but true: Write every morning. Be more ambitious. Because it was coming from him I took it seriously. It’s all very open source. (I’m very curious to see how economic theory and open source intersect in the coming years, I think there’s a lot in the open source world that is novel and useful.)

I’m inconsistent compared to him in those three things but I look up and aspire to the example he sets, especially within the WordPress community where I keep myself easy to reach on the community Slack or talking to people at WordCamps. (Like WordCamp Europe in Turin next week!)