Monthly Archives: December 2015

2015

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Previously: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.

I wrote one year ago that 2015 would be a hard year. And so it was. Here’s the requisite Dec 31 braindump.

In January, I became a dad again. Seeing my two kids grow together and become friends has been one of the privileges of my life. But the logistics of having two kids is pretty different (and much more exhausting) than when you’ve got just one child. The process of finding balance is ongoing.

The other big event of the year is that, in July, our family moved from New York City to Chicago. Moving sucks. It’s expensive, it’s disorienting, it’s inconvenient. My possessions were in limbo with the moving company for something like 13 days. Practicalities aside, it’s hard to leave NYC. While I grew up in the Midwest, I spent my entire adult life in New York and feel like a New Yorker. There’s something about New York that features more prominently in its residents’ inner ideas about who they are than when you live in, say, Ohio. In the same way as when I left graduate school, I’ve had to face this miniature identity crisis by reevaluating those aspects of my former life that are actually (ie, not just conventionally) central to what makes me tick, and then find a way to fit them in the context of my new life. This project is also ongoing 🙂

Partly in response to my man-without-a-country malaise, and partly out of philosophical motivations, I poured myself into free software contribution in 2015. More than 50% of my working year was spent doing unpaid work on WordPress, BuddyPress, and related projects. (More details.) I’m a vocal proponent for structuring your work life in such a way that it subsidizes passion projects, though numbers like these make me wonder whether there’s a limit to how far this principle can be pushed. I guess I’ll continue to test these boundaries in 2016.

One of the things I’d like to do in 2016, as regards work balance, is to find more ways to work with cool people. I am a proud lone wolf, but sometimes I feel like there’s a big disconnect between my highly social free software work and my fairly solitary consulting work.

Happy new year!

WordCamp NYC talk on the history of the WordPress taxonomy component

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At WordCamp NYC 2015, I was pleased to present on the history of the WordPress taxonomy component. Of all the WordCamp talks I’ve given, this one was the most fun to prepare. I spent days reading through old Trac tickets, the wp-hackers archives, and interview transcripts. The jokes are mostly mediocre and the Photoshopping is (mostly intentionally) lousy, but I think the talk turned out OK. Check it out below, or on wordpress.tv.


How to cherry-pick comments using Subversion (for WordPress at least)

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I generally use git-svn for my work on WordPress and related projects. On occasion, I’m forced to touch svn directly. This occurs most often when merging commits from trunk to a stable branch: it’s best to do this in a way that preserves svn:mergeinfo, and git-svn doesn’t do it properly. Nearly every time I have to do these merges, I have to relearn the process. Here’s a reminder for Future Me.

  1. Commit as you normally do to trunk. Make note of the revision number. (Say, 36040.)
  2. Create a new svn checkout of the branch, or svn up your existing one. Eg: $ svn co https://develop.svn.wordpress.org/branches/4.4 /path/to/wp44/
  3. From within the branch checkout: $ svn merge -c 36040 ^/trunk  In other words: merge the specific commit (or comma-separated commits) from trunk of the same repo.
  4. This will leave you with a dirty index (or whatever svn calls it). Use svn status to verify. Run unit tests, etc.
  5. $ svn ci. Copy the trunk commit message to EDITOR, and add a line along the lines of “Merges [36040] to the 4.4 branch”
  6. Drink 11 beers.