For a fuller view of my writing beyond my recent posts, dive in below and peruse as much or as little as you’d like. I write about a wide range of topics from WordPress to Surrogacy to Photography to Mental Health. Don’t follow me if you want to only hear about a certain topic as I write based on what comes up for me in that moment of time. As always, thanks for reading.
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Some Sedona shots
After a local barista gave us the advice that it was okay to still go out hiking, a best pal and I ventured into the fog and rain of Sedona for an early morning hike today. I shoved my camera deep into my jacket, knowing the cold would zap the battery if I wasn’t careful. […]
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places with patterns
Again and again, I’m reminded when nomading of how much the situation and place we are impacts us. It’s a lesson I love to re-learn and re-remember because being in back to back new situations gives me a chance to shake loose ideas of myself and patterns I’ve accrued in staying put. It also gives […]
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Drafts of some recent block art
I still run for fun the Museum of Block Art (MOBA) and, as part of sharing more of the behind the scenes of how the art is made, I wanted to show some of my drafts of my recent “Circling back” piece. It’s called Circling back because it’s a photo of my partner, available in […]
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Returning
Without question, I can say that at the end of this year I feel more like myself. It felt like a year of returning, to places and to ways of being, after 2024 was so brutal. I wanted to renew in 2025 and I feel that I truly did. As with the last two years, […]
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mulling
I’m in Winter Park, Florida for the holidays which means I’m spending an inordinate amount of time peeling back emotional and physical layers of my past self. I found Latin textbooks filled with my terrible handwriting trying to make sense of the ancient language that I worked so hard to become good at. I hold […]
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new light
I’ve been repeating to myself the following one liner over the last few weeks: May you love someone long enough to see them in a new light. It’s been profoundly grounding and, in some ways, aspirational as I think about certain relationships in my life. What an absolute gift it is to really know someone […]
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Chronic Comrades Volume 2
It’s been over a year since I wrote the first entry about chronic comrades, a group of loves ones I brought together to talk about chronic conditions. We’ve continued in the last year but my notes on what we’ve discussed have not. In many ways, it’s hard to know exactly what to share when so […]
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with me
I can’t remember exactly when I got my last pair of cleats but I know they were the ones I wore in college, when I switched from soccer to rugby. My best guess is that I went into college with them as growing up I found it exceedingly hard to find a well fitting cleat […]
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zoom out, zoom in
As many places and as many times as I’ve nomaded around, I can’t seem to shake the anxiety I get when figuring out the logistics of getting from point A to point B. Finding out I was arriving for a 10 day work trip with back to back meetups during the NYC marathon, again, had […]
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no match
We were about to leave for the night, somehow worn out more than the 92 year old and 93 year old before us. My partner’s grandparents remain so full of life. Introversion is no match for extroversion no matter the age though. The 93 year old was in his chair, half listening to the TV […]
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On bringing the Ollie Menu Designer to Core
He said he’s meeting with core committers soon to discuss possible contributor pathways that would allow rapid builders like himself to “hand off” their prototypes to seasoned contributors who could then navigate the processes required to bring new features into core. From the Repository’s post on Ollie’s Menu Designer Lands on WordPress.org, Praised as “Game […]
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Experimenting with AI assisted triaging
Ever since I first started working within the Gutenberg GitHub repository, I’ve felt my organizational brain cringe at how unwieldy it is. I’ve tried countless methods to help involving various recurring to do items to regularly do my part in keeping relevant issues opened and actionable. As we’ve gone deeper into the AI age, I’ve […]
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Recent happy moments
I haven’t been lugging my nice camera around as much recently and I’ve enjoyed being okay with not capturing some sort of ideal photo. Instead, I’ve returned to the quick impromptu snaps one gets on a phone. Here are some from the last few weeks that all reflect a moment of happiness–a surprising split flower, […]
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gloves
I have such a mental image of this quote. “We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time. […]
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Exploring work in progress for WordPress 6.9 v2
With just barely less than one month out from beta 1 for 6.9 and after folks appreciated my last exploration post, I thought I’d continue the fun with another update. Again, this is new so feedback is welcomed. I do try to time box this as otherwise I could end up in an endless rabbit […]
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think best when writing
For a few months now, I’ve been wanting to try out Willow, an AI voice to speech tool. I finally downloaded the free version a few weeks ago and have yet to actually use it. Time and time again, I run into the fact that I think best when writing and spend much of my […]
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those who sustain
Last Sunday, I grabbed my cleats and drove to a saved location in Google Maps called “Sunday Soccer” around 2pm. I didn’t check with anyone ahead of time to see if folks would be there, even though it had been nearly two years since I last played with this crew. Somehow, I knew they would […]
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new content creators slack channel
As part of my passion project of uniting WordPress YouTubers and growing stronger connections between the WordPress project and content creators, I’ve petitioned and kicked off a new slack channel dedicated to #content-creators. Since posts on Make Core have a much different audience than my site here, I wanted to share some bonus thoughts about […]
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Automattic: 11 year anniversary
While I have another year at Automattic to be grateful for and dig into, I want to call out my former colleagues who are still looking for a job after a workforce reduction in April of this year. If you can do anything to support them (make connections, hire them, send jobs their way, etc), […]
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List of folks to hire for your open role
As a follow up to my post on former automatticians who were impacted by a layoff, I wanted to highlight some former colleagues who are open to work and ready to be hired. As a reminder, if you’re hiring, know that ex-Automatticians are adaptable self-starters, lifelong learners, and wildly creative problem solvers. They take deep […]
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Exploring work in progress for WordPress 6.9
With the roadmap and release squad set, I’m already excitedly digging into what’s in progress for 6.9 ahead of attending WordCamp US. To make some of this behind the scenes fun more visible, I thought I’d try something new and share a quick update now that we’re coming up on a month since the roadmap […]
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87 collective years
I talked on the phone for roughly 8.5 hours this weekend, partially due to an unexpected 6.5 hour drive where I decided to pretend I wasn’t an introvert and dialed people at random. I ended up chatting with four childhood friends in particular, each of whom I’ve known for at least 20 years. If I […]
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all or nothing
Every summer, I head to Hendersonville, NC to spend time with members of my family ranging from tiny toddlers to an aging Aunt. It’s also where I first fell in love with wood carving. I dedicated myself to various spoons and spatulas mainly. Over the last five years, I began carving on my own outside […]
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Answering questions about being an Architecture Wrangler
Last week in a WordPress slack community, I was asked a question publicly about my job. I love questions and, inspired by being asked about my job, I am writing this post to share a bit about what I do and why. For transparency, I made up this title 🤠 and it may change as […]
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right as rain
How do you grieve someone you didn’t know? It’s coming up on a year since my brother died and an increasing unsteadiness has crept in over the last week or so. Death is hard to talk about and it’s even harder to talk about when people don’t ask. I wish people would ask about him […]
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Another Pride photo drive
We’re doing another photo drive for the WordPress Photo Directory for Pride this year. I’m excited to fill the directory with more rainbows and representation! One unique challenge with the directory is that photos can’t include recognizable faces. It made me think about stories I’ve heard about early Pride events in parts of the U.S., […]
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personal touch
In an effort to be efficient and still “personable”, I am feeling a loss of humanity in some recent interactions that could be avoided. Specifically, in interactions where I’ve paid for something and the person responding has set up a system where they can seem engaging without actually needing to engage. The most egregious and […]
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long process
I’ve been very slowly reading Soul Mates by Thomas Moore. It’s one of those books that serves you well to read slowly as I find each page takes a while to fully absorb. In the latest return, the following quote caught me, especially as I feel myself running up against the jagged edges of myself: […]
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Engaging with the WordPress Community Post-Sabbatical
As I return from my sabbatical, my capacity to contribute to WordPress is also coming back. While my available hours may be cut, that just means a shift in how I engage with the project. I’m especially interested in gaining the perspective of someone who isn’t sponsored full-time. That way, if and when I’m able […]
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Sabbatical II: 3 months
Similar thoughts have washed over me at the end of this sabbatical that hit me during the last: the way I want to spend my time persists, with or without sabbatical land, and “will I ever be as productive as I was before this?”. I remember towards the end of my first sabbatical writing a […]
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