Chuck Grimmett

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Month: September 2022

  • Week of September 19

    My thirty-third weekly post! A good week at work, some autumnal fare, a sick baby, planning ahead,and some WordPress data exploration.

    Charlie

    Charlie surprised us this week! We played a children’s song playlist on Spotify and he started doing hand motions to some of the songs. We had no idea they were doing that at daycare and it was really fun to see that. Over the weekend he started sounding out a songg by himself without music playing and making hand motions.

    Daycare had picture day and Charlie’s photos were adorable. He knows how to ham it up for the camera.

    Amanda realized that after a day of playing with other kids, Charlie needs some quiet snuggle time when he gets home, so one of us holds him on the couch or on the porch while he has a snack and the other parent gets dinner going. Such a sweet time with our little boy.

    Charlie graduated to taking a bath in the regular tub instead of the baby bath that sets in the tub. He loves playing with floating tug boats and the faucet.

    Poor little guy got sick at the end of the week and is having a tough weekend. He was supposed to go to the first day of fall swim lessons on Saturday, but unfortunately he couldn’t. He is snoozing on me while I type this.

    When Charlie wakes up from a nap on either Amanda or me and looks up and smiles because he realizes he is snuggling with one of us, it melts our hearts.

    Projects & work

    My Jekyll Tools repo reached 100 stars and 30 forks this week!

    I don’t use Jekyll anymore, so I haven’t updated this in a couple years. Cool to see it continue being used. I’d be happy to take PRs and add other contributors.

    I published a post exploring WordPress core contributor stats:

    https://cagrimmett.com/data-viz/2022/09/24/some-wp-core-contributor-stats/

    I learned how to use pup (a command line tool for processing HTML) and Datasette (a tool for exploring data) while compiling this.

    The post generated some community discussion on Twitter, and I learned:

    I helped Charlie’s previous nanny (who we hired for a couple months when I had to go back to work but nighttime wake ups and feedings were still tough and Amanda needed to get some sleep) set up a website for her business this week. It is nice to walk people through using WordPress for the first time and take them from not having a domain to launching a landing page in under an hour.

    I had a really good week at work. I can’t talk about most of it, but I’ll just say that I got a lot of work done, got some good feedback, helped out coworkers, and moved some important projects forward.

    Food & Drink

    A few things of note this week (I won’t bore you with the ham sandwiches or grilled chicken):

    Amanda made bacon cheddar chive scones with our garden chives.

    I made the first lentil sausage soup of the season. It was chilly in the second half of the week!

    Lentil, Sausage, Potato, and Greens Soup – Cook Like Chuck
    This is one of my favorite soups. As soon as the cold weather sets in, I make this at least twice a month.
    cooklikechuck.com

    I made one of my favorite quick meals again this week: Turmeric black pepper chicken and vegetables. Takes less than 30 minutes and is delicious. Charlie eats it, too. Asparagus, green beans, broccoli, and snow peas all work well.

    Turmeric-Black Pepper Chicken With Asparagus Recipe – NYT Cooking
    In this sweet and spicy stir-fry, black pepper, honey and rice vinegar help accentuate turmeric’s delightfully earthy qualities Thinly sliced asparagus doesn’t need much time to cook, but feel free to swap with any other vegetables that cook in just a few minutes, like thinly sliced green beans, frozen peas or baby spinach Serve this with rice or rice vermicelli noodles, or tuck it into a lettuce cup or pita with yogurt and fresh herbs
    cooking.nytimes.com

    I finally bottled the orange bitters I started in April.

    • It turned out good! Closest to Regan’s, but has a bit more spice. Nice in Manhattans and Boulevardiers.
    • I used 6 oranges last time and 12 oranges this time. Next time it needs to be 18 or 24 to get the intense orange flavor I’m looking for.
      • I don’t know how some of the brands of orange bitters out there get the flavor and color. I think they use orange extract and caramel coloring.

    The recipe for this batch is up in my digital garden.

    I have a bunch of 1oz eye droppers of the stuff. If you want a bottle, let me know!

    Planning

    • Cold weather is coming. Time to start thinking about getting garlic and flowers that need a cold period (black-eyed susans, milkweed, echinacea, poppies)
    • We’ve been toying with the idea of expanding our deck and maybe putting an outdoor screened in porch on part of it.
      • Do we need permits?
      • Can we do this work ourselves?
      • How big is too big?
    • We planned a trip to Lake Placid.
      • What are the must-dos/sees?
      • What is good to eat around there?
      • What are some good books set in the area to read while we are there or listen to on the drive up?
    • I’m looking for some good autumn reads. I’m starting with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. What else should I read?

    Reading

    Currently reading:

    • The Adirondack Reader by various authors
    • Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig, second in the Montana trilogy
    • The Juncto by Neal Stephenson, fifth in the Baroque Cycle series

    Around the web

    Cool things I read or dug into for the first time this week.

    Robin Rendle’s notes on taking care of your blog:

    Blog your heart! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that one browser bug you’ve noticed this morning or blog about the sky above you right this very second. How many clouds are up there? Blog about your annoying kids and your fucked up relationship and blog about that terrifying time when you went to the beach with some people you weren’t really friends with and you got drunk and then it got real dark and you didn’t have a tent so you slept on a sand dune all night long.

    I say again to ye: just blog!

    There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away. But don’t wait up for success to come, it’s going to be a slog—there will be years before you see any benefit. But slowly, with enough momentum behind it, your blog will show you the world: there will be distant new friends, new enemies, whole continents might open up and welcome themselves to you.

    The revitalization of NY’s waters:

    Nine humpback whales recently surfaced there together, spouting and breeching against the city skyline as though vying for the most dramatic selfie. Fin whales and right whales are also appearing in startling numbers—along with bottlenose dolphins, spinner and hammerhead sharks, seals, blue crabs and seahorses. Oysters, which all but vanished decades ago, are clamping themselves to bulkheads from Brooklyn’s Coney Island Creek to the Mario Cuomo Bridge, almost 20 miles up the Hudson from the city.

    Off to hold a sick baby and maybe make applesauce from the two bushels of apples on our table 👋🍎

  • Some WordPress Core Contributor stats

    The Inspiration

    Earlier this week David Bisset asked:

    This got me curious. Is this data out there? How might one get it?

    I started looking at core release posts and saw that contributors are linked, which gave me the idea to scrape it and see what I could come up with.

    Caveats about this data

    1. Since this data is from the thanked contributors in core release posts, it includes more than just code contributions. It also includes documentation, testing, design, marketing, etc.
    2. I only included data from 5.0-6.0 named releases.
      • 5.0 was released in December 2018, almost 4 years ago. 4 years seemed far enough to go back.
      • I only included named core releases, as those are the larger ones that more people contribute to. The maintenance and security releases have a much smaller set of contributors.
    3. The data gets less accurate the further I go back in terms of release dates because I can only scrape their current profile, not their previous profiles. Some most likely switched employers.
    4. The data is only as accurate as the profiles on WordPress.org. Not all profiles have employers listed. There are some folks I know work for big companies in the WordPress ecosystem and contribute to core who do not have an employer listed. I did not add any that were missing, I went by what is available.
    5. I had to do a lot of manual clean up to make the data consistent, which is typical when you scrape data from the web. If I made a mistake or missed something, that mistake is mine alone.
    6. In full transparency, I work at Automattic. This exploration was not done as part of my work there, but as a curious member of the WordPress.org community. In the WordPress project, I am a part of the Photos team.
    7. There are many other ways to contribute to the WordPress ecosystem and project that are not captured in this data. I only pulled data on contributors to named core releases.
    8. It is possible I made some scraping, formula, or calculation mistakes. If you find something wrong, please let me know.

    Contributors to named core releases, grouped by company, for versions 5.0-6.0

    Note: If someone has an employer listed on their profile, that does not necessarily mean they are sponsored by that company. If you want to know about sponsored contributors, go to the Sponsored section.

    Core release6.05.95.85.75.65.55.45.35.25.15.0
    Total contributors551658560502679866592707385550477
    Company 1Automattic (77, 14%)Automattic (94, 14.3%)Automattic (88, 15.7%)Automattic (66, 13.1%)Automattic (79, 11.6%)Automattic (87, 10%)Automattic (60, 10.1%)Automattic (61, 8.6%)Automattic (42, 10.9%)Automattic (55, 10%)Automattic (62, 13%)
    Company 210up (15, 2.7%)Yoast (14, 2.1%)Yoast (12, 2.1%)10up (12, 2.4%)Yoast (14, 2.1%)10up (16, 1.8%)10up (11, 1.9%)Yoast (16, 2.3%)10up (11, 2.9%)Yoast (20, 3.6%)10up (14, 2.9%)
    Company 3Yoast (10, 1.8%)10up (11, 1.7%)10up (11, 2%)Yoast (11, 2.2%)10up (13, 1.9%)Whodunit (11, 1.3%)Yoast, Whodunit, Human Made (7, 1.2%)10up (14, 2%)Human Made (6, 1.6%)10up (16, 2.9%)Human Made (11, 2.3%)
    Company 4Multidots (9, 1.6%)Multidots (10, 1.5%)Human Made (5, 0.9%)XWP, Google (6, 1.2%)Awesome Motive (8, 1.2%)Yoast, rtCamp (9, 1%)XWP (6, 1%)Human Made (9, 1.3%)Yoast (5, 1.3%)Human Made (9, 1.6%)Yoast (10, 2.1%)
    Company 5rtCamp (6, 1.1%)XWP (6, 0.9%)XWP, rtCamp Google, Bluehost, Awesome Motive, Alley (4, 0.7%)Awesome Motive (5, 1%)XWP (6, 0.9%)XWP, WP Engine, Human Made (8, 0.9%)Multidots, Google, Bluehost (4, 0.7%)Multidots (7, 1%)Google (4, 1%)rtCamp (7, 1.3%)Bluehost (6, 1.3%)
    No company listed245 (44.5%)306 (46.5%)259 (46.3%)238 (47.4%)332 (48.9%)434 (50.1%)307 (51.9%)348 (49.2%)182 (47.3%)247 (44.9%)230 (48.2%)
    Company name (Count of employed contributors, percentage of the total number of contributors)

    Individuals who contributed to all 11 of the most recent named core releases

    49 people have contributed to all 11 releases (5.0-6.0) I pulled data for. I think these people deserve special recognition:

    The companies these awesome individuals work for:

    • Automattic (13)
    • Google (4)
    • 10up (3)
    • Alley (2)
    • XWP (2)
    • Yoast (2)
    • Accessible Web Design (1)
    • Advies en zo (1)
    • Awesome Motive (1)
    • Bluehost (1)
    • Dekode Interaktiv AS (1)
    • FlipMetrics (1)
    • GoDaddy (1)
    • Happy Prime (1)
    • Human Made (1)
    • Parship Group (1)
    • Penske Media Corporation (1)
    • SendtoNews Incorporated (1)
    • Shopify (1)
    • Whodunit (1)
    • iThemes (1)
    • required (1)

    7 of these individuals has no employer listed in their wordpress.org profile.

    27 of these individuals have the Sponsored tag on their profile.

    These are the number of contributors per release that have the Sponsored tag in their profile. This is a count of sponsored contributors, not necessarily a good breakdown of the amount contributed by each.

    Core release6.05.95.85.75.65.55.45.35.25.15.0
    Total contributors551658560502679866592707385550477
    Sponsored110125103771061046772546362
    Sponsored %19.9%18.9%18.4%15.3%15.6%12%11.3%10.2%14%11.5%13%

    These are the sponsored contributors grouped by company. Includes count of sponsored contributors and the percentage of the total number of sponsored contributors for that release.

    Core release6.05.95.85.75.65.55.45.35.25.15.0
    Company 1Automattic (61, 55.5%)Automattic (65, 52%)Automattic (55, 53.4%)Automattic (32, 41.6%)Automattic (43, 40.6%)Automattic (36, 34.6%)Automattic (24, 35.8%)Automattic (23, 31.9%)Automattic (16, 29.6%)Automattic (16, 25.4%)Automattic (21, 33.9%)
    Company 2XWP (7, 6.4%)Yoast (10, 8%)Yoast (7, 6.8%)Yoast (8, 10.4%)Yoast (11, 10.4%)Whodunit (7, 6.7%)Yoast (6, 9%)Yoast (10, 13.9%)Yoast (5, 9.3%)Yoast (11, 17.5%)Yoast, XWP (6, 9.7%)
    Company 3Yoast (6, 5.5%)Multidots (6, 4.8%)XWP (5, 4.9%)XWP (5, 6.5%)XWP, 10up (5, 4.7%)Yoast, XWP, WP Engine (6, 5.8%)Whodunit (5, 7.5%)Whodunit, Google (4, 5.6%)Google (4, 7.4%)XWP, Human Made, Google (4, 6.3%)Google (4, 6.5%)
    Company 4Google, GoDaddy, Extendify (4, 3.6%)XWP (5, 4%)Google, 10up (4, 3.9%)Google, 10up (4, 5.2%)WP Engine, Google, Awesome Motive (4, 3.8%)Human Made, Google, Awesome Motive (4, 3.8%)Google (4, 6%)XWP, Human Made (3, 4.2%)XWP, Human Made, Bluehost, 10up (3, 5.6%)10up (3, 4.8%)Human Made, Bluehost, 10up (3, 4.8%)
    Company 5Multidots, Human Made, Awesome Motive (3, 2.7%)Google, Bluehost (4, 3.2%)GoDaddy, Awesome Motive (3, 2.9%)WP Engine, Whodunit, Required, Human Made, GoDaddy, Bluehost, Awesome Motive (2, 2.6%)Human Made, Extendify, Bluehost (3, 2.8%)GoDaddy, Bluehost, 10up (3, 2.9%)XWP, Human Made, 10up (3, 4.5%)WP Engine, rtCamp, Required, Bluehost, Awesome Motive, 10up (2, 2.8%)WP Engine, WebDevStudios, Awesome Motive (2, 3.7%)WPMUDEV, Whodunit, WebDevStudios, Required, Bluehost, Awesome Motive (2, 3.2%)WebDevStudios Required (2, 3.2%)
    Company name (Count of sponsored contributors, percentage of the total number of sponsored contributors)

    How I gathered and analyzed this data

    1. For each named core release (I.e. 6.0 “Arturo”, 5.9 “Josephine”, etc) I used the free version of Data Miner to pull the list of thanked contributors in the release post.
      • You could do this with a script too, but I already had Data Miner installed and knew how to use it, so it was the fastest way to get what I needed.
      • The element I targeted: p.is-style-wporg-props-long a
      • I saved the href attribute for each result in a text file.
    2. I looped through each text file of contributor URLs with a bash script and pulled in two fields from their wordpress.org profiles: Employer and Contributions.
      • I used curl, tr, awk, and pup to transform the data into something useable.
    // Assumes an input file named 5-1.txt with a list of profile URLs
// requires pup https://github.com/ericchiang/pup
for url in $(head -n800 5-1.txt); do
    employer="$(curl -s $url | pup -p 'li#user-company text{}' | awk '{sub(/Employer:/,"")} 1' | tr -d '\n' | tr -d '\t')"
    contributions="$(curl -s $url | pup -p 'div.item-meta-contribution text{}' | tr -d '\n' | tr -d '\t')"
    echo "$url | $employer | $contributions" >> 5-1_contributors.txt
done
    1. I first started exploring the data in Google Sheets and made pivot tables for each named release.
      • This took a lot of data clean up to make the data more consistent. Since the Employer field is open text, there were lots of different versions of the same company (Company, Company Inc, Company PVT LTD, etc). I cleaned it up the best I could in the time I wanted to spend on it, but there are still probably some duplicates.
      • This gave me the table of stats for the companies represented in each named release.
      • I used regex to find which company sponsors a contributor based on their Contributions section on their profile and made a pivot table of this information.
    2. I used Datasette to explore a CSV of all contributors and which version they contributed to. This gave me the list of 49 people who contributed to all 11 versions I checked and which companies they work for.

    Data sources

    Want to take a look at this data?

    More areas for exploration

    1. Code contributions from SVN?
      • Number of lines changed by contributor and also grouped by employer
    2. Finding more accurate data?
      • If there were snapshots of this data from each release, it would be nice to use those instead. I could only pull data from current profiles, and users may have switched employers. For example, up until recently mkaz worked at Automattic, but since he no longer does, his previous contributions are not grouped under Automattic.
      • Not all profiles have employers listed. There are some folks I know work for big companies in the WordPress ecosystem and contribute to core who do not have an employer listed.
    3. Graphing different facets of this data to see how it changes over time.

  • Week of September 12

    Charlie

    Charlie has been very sweet this week. Some things that come to mind from this week:

    • He has preferred to eat breakfast while snuggling on one of our laps.
    • He learned how to use a straw and he loves it. This opens up a new world of possibilities like smoothies.
    • He loves to dip whatever he is eating in sauces/dips.
    • He learned how to brush his teeth. He has an adorable giraffe toothbrush and we all brush our teeth together before bedtime.
    • He has been more and more interested in flipping through his books by himself. He also started to read books to us. We read books to him every night before going to bed as a way to wind down, and also whenever he brings us a book during the day. Once we finish, sometimes he takes it and talks while flipping through the pages like he is reading it to us.
    • He says words very close to “Buddy” (the neighbor’s dog) and “that” and “dog” while pointing to things. He has also started to mimic things we say, which is adorable.
    • He is transitioning to a 1-nap-a-day toddler.
    • He has been showing affection to stuffed animals, picking them up and hugging them.

    Food & Drink

    A couple things worth sharing from this week in cooking:

    • I made some pretty good pizza on Tuesday. We used dough from Trader Joe’s instead of making it ourselves this time. Their regular dough is pretty decent, but the stand out is their herb dough, which we used to make cheesy garlic bread.
    • I made some pizza sauce from garden tomatoes, garden basil and oregano, and garlic, onion, and salt.
      • Blanched the tomatoes and removed the peel
      • Tossed all of the ingredients in a pot and let it cook down for 30 minutes while occasionally smashing it with a potato masher
      • Put it in a quart container and blended it with the stick blender
    • A friend and I experimented with cooking a whole spatchcocked chicken in the pizza oven in a cast iron pan. It worked pretty well!
      • We let the Ooni get really hot after making pizza before we put the chicken in, then turned the flame way down when we did put the chicken in.
      • We turned the pan regularly.
      • Total time was probably 25 minutes, though we didn’t keep a close eye on the clock and went by the chicken’s temperature instead, which we checked with an instant read thermometer.
      • What I’d do different next time is covering the chicken with foil for the first 10-15 minutes to keep the skin from charring.

    Sean Nelson reminded me it was Negroni Week this week, so I made a Kingston Negroni, which essentially swaps the gin out for Smith & Cross Jamaican rum. The funky, fruit-forward rum holds up well to the spice in the sweet vermouth and the bitterness of the Campari.

    We’ve made a couple Jungle Bird cocktails this week since we have some pineapple juice we need to use up. The classic recipe is good, but so is swapping the simple syrup for passionfruit syrup like Pagan Idol does.

    Miscellany

    We are having Great Plains weather this week 40-60F at night, 75-85F during the day. This is the weather I like. Good for sleeping.

    I took the guideboat out on the Hudson River for the second time this year. It was great to get out and row a bit. I’m going to try to get out a few more times before it gets too cold to do so.

    Knowing when go weigh in and when not go weigh in is a key skill you have to learn by doing, not one that can be taught.

    Digging in to the motivations behind your actions and other people’s actions is one of the most helpful things in gaining empathy and resolving conflict.

    I am a heavy user of search on my own websites, so I made it easy on myself. On any page on this site or my digital garden, if you his Command+Shift+F, it will bring up the search modal.

    Reading

    • Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig, second in the Montana trilogy
    • The Juncto by Neal Stephenson, fifth in the Baroque Cycle series

    Cool stuff from around the internet this week

    “Life Goes On” With Stewart Brand
    www.palladiummag.com
    WordCamp US 2022 – Nick Diego
    nickdiego.com

    This is Nick Diego’s talk on building blocks from WordCamp US, a big WordPress conference. Very clever use of FSE, cover blocks, and anchor links to make a public presentation directly in WordPress. Great content on block development, too.

    A Mathematical Theory of License Plates | Charlie Meyer’s Blog
    Tags: math-that-isnt-useful Preface “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight… I saw a car with the license plate ARW357. Can you imagine?…
    blog.charliemeyer.co
    Running WordPress in the Browser
    Nowadays, you can run WordPress entirely in your browser thanks to WebAssembly, an exciting and growing technology that allows you to compile different languages into binaries. Read how we implemented it and try our demo.
    wasmlabs.dev
    Gutendex
    gutendex.com

    Cool JSON web API for Project Gutenberg books. h/t Ilya Radchenko

    Mental Models for Better Thinking – Farnam Street
    How do you make sense of the world around you? How do you navigate through it? When problems arise, how do you confront them?Mental models shape how you see the world, how you approach problems, and even unconsciously surface the information you think is important.
    fs.blog

    Cool course on mental models. The mental models books that Farnam Street put out are good, too!

    Caspar Babypants, fun rock music for kids, h/t Jeremy Felt

    Spicy, Seared, Smothered, Stacked: An Introduction to Mexican Sandwiches
    The Mexican sandwich takes the same taco flavors and turns them up to eleven, offering a world of fluffy buns and spicy meats that no food lover should leave uneaten. Here are a few of our favorite types.
    www.seriouseats.com

    That’s it for this week! Time to mow the grass, clean the house, and figure out what to make for dinner. Maybe we’ll have a fire in the chiminea tonight, too.

  • Week of September 5

    When we pick him up from daycare, Charlie has been signaling to be picked up, then he hugs us and gives us a kiss on the cheek. It is so sweet 🥰

    Charlie is Mr. Independent right now. Except when he crawls or walks underneath something and gets stuck, then he appreciates Mom and Dad coming to help.

    A pretty rainy week after a long dry spell. We definitely needed it.

    Finally got around to updating my Reading page to add what I’ve read the last couple months.

    Though, inspired by Mitchell Earl, I really ought to add the books I started but didn’t finish, too. There would be at least 10 more from the past two months across multiple genres. Currently the page only shows the ones I finished, which have been all fiction recently.

    Unfinished from the last couple months (but still in the pile to finish): William Gibson, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Saint-Exupery, Ivan Doig, Jane McGonigal, John McPhee, Zena Hitz, Allan Ginsberg, Ruth Reichl, Zadie Smith, Edward Abbey, and Sherwood Anderson. I jump around a bit.

    I’d love to say that I’m going to take autumn to finish these books, but I’ll honestly probably buy 12 more, finish 5 of those, and only finish 2-3 of these 🤷‍♂️

    Cooking of note this week:

    I find the new Instagram update that autoplays sounds on ads and video stories hostile and unusable. It breaks the traditional pattern of honoring the users’ silent setting and makes it impossible to stop the sound unless you turn your volume completely to zero.

    I wrote a traditional blog post this week:

    https://cagrimmett.com/miscellaneous/2022/09/08/wp-cron-and-the-clock-of-the-long-now/

    Our team at work played a remote team social game that was more fun than expected: Everyone takes a photo of their desk and everyone tries to figure out which desk belongs to which team member. We had a blast!

    Here is a photo of my desk:

    I helped my friend Jeremy build a swing set for his son Miles (Charlie’s friend!) on Saturday. The boys enjoyed it!

    Amanda and I are watching Billions and House of the Dragon right now after Charlie goes to bed and we finish cleaning up from dinner.

    I’m off to make some pizza sauce and clean the kitchen. I can’t use the pizza oven tonight because it is raining, but hopefully I can use it tomorrow. 👋

  • If a Visitor is There to See: WP-Cron and the Clock of the Long Now

    What do WP-Cron and the 10,000 Year Clock of the Long Now have in common?

    They both only tell time if someone is there to see them.

    Huh?

    Most clocks have a power source to keep their faces updated. But in a clock buried deep in a mountain, why waste energy updating the clock face if no one is there to see it? Instead, why not use the humans who come to see it to wind a falling weight that will update the clock face with the current time.

    Hillis and Brand plan, if they can, to add a mechanism whereby the power source generates only enough energy to keep track of time; if visitors want to see the time displayed, they would have to manually supply some energy themselves.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now#Displaying_the_time_and_date

    Okay, cool. Now what about WordPress? Doesn’t it have a clock?

    Actually, no. Unlike its cron namesake in Linux, WP-Cron isn’t a clock at all. There are some historical conversations you can look up in IRC and trac (fun fact: it used to be called pseudo-cron!) about why this is the case, but the short version is that WordPress is made to be an application running on top of a system, and it isn’t guaranteed that it will have access to the system’s scheduler (on shared hosts, for example), so instead with WP-Cron, all scheduled tasks are put into a queue that is checked with every page load, and will run at the next opportunity (meaning the next page load). While you can’t be 100% sure when your task will run, you can be 100% sure that it will run eventually. [Source]

    If you are very particular about your WP posts going up at a certain time, there are ways you can hack pageviews, such as setting a service like Uptime Robot to ping your website every minute. Or you can move to a host like WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, or WPEngine that has a bit tighter integration with the system clock and wp-cron. Or you can roll your own using Lingon to interface with macOS’s launchd.

    So if a post gets published on WordPress, it is because someone was there to see it, and if someone sees the time on the Clock of the Long Now, they had to crank it themselves. Age-old conundrum solved.

    h/t Mark Drovdahl for a conversation that sparked this musing

  • Week of August 29

    Charlie is officially a toddler now. He took his first unassisted steps Sunday, August 28, and by Thursday he was wandering all around the house on his own. It is so fun to see how proud he is when he figures out a new skill.

    He also has crawling up the stairs and climbing furniture down pat. Along with that comes pushing boundaries to learn where the lines are, which is trying for sleep-deprived parents. We are doing our best to take deep breaths, stay calm, and be patient.

    We froze 9 bags of tomatoes (about a pound and a half each) this week. That makes 17 bags total so far, on top of what we’ve eaten. The plants keep going! We planted 8 tomato plants this year: 6 Romas, 1 Cherokee Purple, and 1 Giant Belgium.

    We might be finally though the intense summer heat here. I’m going to leave the window units in a bit longer just incase, but we are loving having the windows open and not being drenched in sweat.

    I mowed the lawn for the first time in a month. I’ve only had to mow once a month this summer because of how dry it has been. Most of the grass is brown and I’m only mowing to knock down the weeds that seem to thrive in the dry heat.

    I’ve been a bit under the weather this week. I picked up a cold from Charlie, who picked it up from daycare. The goldenrod is in full bloom right now, too, kicking my seasonal allergies into high gear. I’m on the tail end of the cold, so next week should be easier. I’m thankful for this long holiday weekend.

    Some work-related news: I’m switching teams (though staying within the same division/group) and becoming a team lead again, this time of one of our engineering teams. I wrapped up and handed off my projects last week and am starting the new position on Tuesday. I’m excited about the new role!

    I’m getting sick of social media again. This happens once every few months. I might be scarce there for a bit and blog here more.

    Amanda and I have been enjoying House of the Dragon on HBO and The Sandman on Netflix. The latter makes me want to revisit the comics again.

    What Labor Day Weekend looked like for us:

    Going to post this and sign off now and make the best of the rest of the day today. Maybe making pizzas on the deck? Another tiki drink? Long walk by the river? We’ll see what the day has in store.