alda

alda, 4 months ago to random

Wait — do Americans register their party affiliation with the government?

alda, 9 months ago to wordpress

Okay kids. I must ask.

How is this better than using or compiling CSS?

#BlockEditor #FSE #WordPress

alda, 10 months ago to random

Try a cargo bike for a day and you will not only get road rage from cars, but also lycra clad fuckers on carbon fibre bikes.

alda, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to random

As someone who has actually read Adam Smith, I find it amazing that he is considered to be the father of libertarianism and celebrated by modern-day greedy capitalists.

The Wealth of Nations is basically him observing vehicles of corruption and trying to find means to improve equality.

I'm not even sure if the editors of the Uni. Chicago Press edition have even read the whole thing themselves.

What this does symbolise is how a certain class of people are bullshitters through-and-through.

alda, 9 months ago to random

I can imagine React ending up as the WordPress of JS frameworks, if it hasn't already.

There is usually nothing wrong with re-using components or duct-taping a site together using plugins, but doing so without much thought can have negative consequences.

This way of thinking does affect what project managers and clients expect as custom work is not really accounted for when it comes to planning things — just reuse someone else's work and program some plumbing between them if you need to.

alda, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

Serious question: Do we really need to minify our JS and CSS files?

Does it matter at all if we're gzipping the HTTP streams anyway?

Edit: Just to be perfectly clear, by wondering if it matters, I'm not asking how many kb I may or may not be saving per request, but if it affects the user experience in a meaningful way like LCF due to large images with undefined dimensions does.

alda, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to wordpress

I just finished the first part of my story of applying and getting hired at #automattic which to many is a dream workplace that managed to figure out remote work practices two decades ago.

I have seen many stories of the process online but I have not seen anything like mine, which was coloured by negligence, bad management practices and a work culture that does not suit a cornerstone of the #WordPress community.

Read more at https://aldavigdis.dev/2023/08/18/my-strange-experiences-with-automattic-part-1/.

#tech #jobs #remotework

alda, 7 months ago to devops

My take on #DevOps these days is that there are no clever and elegant solutions out there for small scale infrastructure needs, even if those are the majority of the backend systems out there.

So many things are invented for large-scale and high demand services and then supposedly tickle down to smaller systems.

The thing is that I don't need a real-time job scheduler for my Rails app image processing pipeline. I really just need a cron job that runs every 10 minutes or so during office hours.

alda, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

As some already know, films are often screened dubbed into German in Germany, which I still find off as I grew up in a country where we subtitle most films, except for children's cartoons.

After the local IMAX closed, few cinemas in West Berlin have taken the slack when it comes to original language screenings and just looking at the seat reservation status for Zoo Palast, which is the only cinema screening the 70 mm version of Oppenheimer, I find this tendency to be even stranger.

alda, 2 months ago to wordpress

Things that are built into WordPress but receive little-to-no use:

1. Hello.php and an upsell of Akismet
2. Blog posts
3. Comments
4. Dependency on an external service for profile pictures

Things that aren't built into WordPress but should be:

1. Multiple authors per post
2. A form builder for wp-admin
3. An ORM that prevents n+1 queries
4. Modularity via composer packages
5. Bucket storage support

#WordPress #PHP

alda, 4 months ago to random

I saw some ads from "Visit Great Britain" yesterday while waiting for a train, with pitches about skydiving in Wales and whatnot.

I don't think people who work at ad agencies know why anyone would ever visit the UK, so here's my list:

1. Get dinner at a chippy in Grimsby or whatever, while being shitfaced. Extra malt vinegar, please.

2. Play darts at a worn-down local pub, while being shitfaced.

3. Get hypothermia at Blackpool. While being shitfaced.

4. That train museum in York. Shitfaced.

alda, 2 months ago to wordpress

For the record (pun intended), what is called a "post" in #WordPress and is used in #Automattic's terms and conditions is what other frameworks would refer to as "objects" or "records".

"Custom post types" are "models" in the context of MVC patterns.

Blog posts and news articles are posts. Images are posts. Contact form submissions are posts. Customer purchases in #WooCommerce are posts.

alda, 1 month ago to wordpress

"WordPress is easy" said the person who never had to add a single field to the WooCommerce checkout form.

Yes. This is 628 added or modified lines of code and the relevant documentation.

For a single text field.

#WordPress #WooCommerce #PHP

alda, 6 months ago to random

Icelanders have gotten so used to simply looking each other up in the phone book, having almost unlimited access to the population registry and having personally identifiable information about them available wherever, with little but a thin language barrier protecting them, that nobody thought that would not be a good idea.

Which is regrettable now, as there's a huge wave of phone and ID theft scams going on in the country.

alda, 8 months ago to wordpress

The second post in the "Strange experiences with Automattic" series is out.

This one covers my first day, the Grand Meetup and how things were for me in the beginning.

Hanlon’s Razor has limits and when the extent of mismanagement goes beyond anything that can be described as accidental or a misunderstanding, then it no longer applies and the issues are in fact systemic.

https://aldavigdis.dev/2023/08/25/my-strange-experiences-with-automattic-part-2/

#Automattic #WordPress #RemoteWork #EmbraceTheChaos

alda, 5 months ago to random

So the eruption in Iceland just started. It's right next to the Blue Lagoon and the nearby power plant. Possibly the worst possible location.

alda, 3 months ago to random

Let's say I have two backend systems running #PHP One of them needs to send batches of data to the other one on regular intervals.

Instead of following REST conventions and using JSON, which is resource intensive on both ends, is there anything that tells me I shouldn't just use PHP's built-in serialisation functionality instead?

alda, 9 months ago to random

Do you ever make a giant turd, look into the toilet bowl and think "woah, all of this came out of my butthole"?

alda, 5 months ago to random

Things that I just can't tolerate with German etiquette: People greeting each other in doctor's waiting rooms.

Things that Germans can't tolerate with Icelandic etiquette: Titles and surnames not really being a thing.

alda, 10 months ago to wordpress

An issue that I ran into last week:

A business sought me out because of an issue with a #WordPress site they were running. The server got overloaded and crashed every 3 hours for half an hour at a time and it was important to get to the bottom of this.

The hints that I got were that the site had been migrated to a new server in order to isolate it and that the issue started when someone was hired to integrate certain accounting software with it. 🧵

alda, 3 months ago to Iceland

Parts of the Icelandic medical establishment have been having a moral panic over topological hormonal medicine for menopausal cis women, with numerous op-eds being written in journals and newspapers.

The problem — if there is a problem at all — is insufficient instructions and advice from endocrinologists and pharmacists.

🧵

#Iceland #Hormones

alda, 9 months ago to random

The Icelandic translation for the Windows image editor uses the word for free as in free beer, not as in freeform image cropping for freeform image cropping.

alda, 2 months ago to wordpress

I think this is the day that I've finally decided to treat WP as any other propriety software suite with an API that I'm developing against. I'll read release notes and about upcoming features, but I am not going to assume that me or anyone I know can affect those things and that "the community" is simply a collection of user groups that cannot affect things either.

#WordPress #PHP #webdev

alda, 10 months ago to random

Who thought it was a good idea to put the breathing hole and the feeding hole into the same orifice?

Intelligent design, my arse.

alda, 1 month ago to wordpress

Here is the structure of a #WordPress How-To article:

[An introduction with a bunch of crap written by Chat-GPT]

[An initial example using the built-in plugin/theme editor, demonstrating the author's disregard to best practices and urging others to be unprofessional]

[A screenshot of some scary-looking PHP code]

[A section claiming how difficult and technically involved the previous step was, suggesting there's an alternative]

[A plug for the author's plugin that does the thing you want]