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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Let’s call WordPress 6.4 the “Underrepresented Gender Led Release”
Let’s call WordPress 6.4 the “Underrepresented Gender Led Release”.
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live the questions
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” Rainer Maria Rilke In searching for a different quote, I stumbled back on this one. I have…
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How to run the official product demos in WordPress release cycles
Rich Tabor and I have taken on the new product demos in the last two WordPress release cycles: Your WordPress 6.2 Preview and WordPress 6.3 Live Product Demo – Highlights & Recording. To spread the love and ensure others can contribute in this way, I wanted to share at a high level how we prepare and to encourage others to raise their hand if they’d like to take this on in the future. The steps right now are pretty simple but the details and effort going into each are immense: Along the way, you’ll need to coordinate with the Marketing…
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return
Once a year growing up, I’d head up to Hendersonville, NC to spend a week with my broader family on my mom’s side (and sometimes my dad’s). We’re back again this year with more family in tow than usual. The setting is a beautiful property with a lake, hiking trails, cabins, and small children roaming. I can walk outside the front door of our cabin, wait to hear the screen door slam so specifically, and typically stumble into someone who is related to me within a 15 minute stroll. There’s both structure to the days and none at all. You…
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pair
“Life is better in a pair”. There seems to be something in the water. Numerous folks have found different ways of telling me the same thing in the last year or so. On the surface, it’s harmless and rings true to our societal norms, particularly in the US. There’s some truth to it financially, especially when you take into account the rising cost of being single in the US of A. Rather than questioning the wider system we’re in, I instead get a chorus of voices encouraging me to find my partner. I sense it in the excitement of family…
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WordPress 6.3 Source of Truth
Building off of my public 6.2 Source of Truth, I’m offering up the next edition for WordPress 6.3, set to launch August 8th, 2023. This is an early look — come back on July 25th, 2023 if you want a confirmed finalized version. I like to share early and often both to find areas of improvement, get feedback, and put power in the hands of those involved in helping get the wider WordPress community up to speed on what’s coming. In particular, I’d recommend staying up to date on the dev notes as those are coming out on a rolling…
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where the same moment will travel to
We live in a strange time where our impact on others can reach mind numbing levels, even if by accident. Out of college, I started sharing reviews on Google Maps mainly to get access to some of their early “reward” events in San Francisco with my girlfriend at the time. We went to Alcatraz for one, touring incredible lego portraits by Ai Weiwei of political prisoners. As I traveled, I kept with it, mostly to praise places that were especially kind or delicious or beautiful. I reviewed a spot on my most recent trip to the Dolomites only to find…
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10 days in the Dolomites
As I settle back into life in Seattle, I wanted to quickly brain dump my journey to the Dolomites in particular, mainly as I aim to return (again and again). I feel so lucky to have been helped by a coworker who kindly sent me a list ahead of time to narrow down my search. Outside of that very personal gift of insight, I also found earthtrekkers.com to be an incredible resource. If you’re planning your own trip, I recommend digging in there as I’m not going to bother sharing many details of the hikes as they can all be…
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she knew and she loved
I twirled my grandma’s loose rings around my thumbs as I climbed and spoke words of gratitude, knowing she’s a big reason I have the life I have now. Knowing that she knew I was queer nearly my entire life and didn’t skip a beat in loving me. For some reason during this Pride month, swirling with continual horrible news for LGBTQ+ folks, it’s this story that I’m returning to again and again. She knew and she loved. She knew and she loved. Why is it so hard? I wonder sometimes if she looked at queer people differently after her…
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relish
I’m off work for the next two weeks, starting today, after a whirlwind trip for WCEU 2023, my first time attending. It was a wild first time and I intentionally paced myself, thankfully for the lack of rigidity especially as I hardly slept while there. The first day, I spoke on a panel about women and non-binary people in WordPress: It felt surreal to try to represent even a small fraction of those wider voices on that stage. I hope my thoughts added to the discussion and perhaps might have helped folks think about things a touch differently. The Museum…
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Happy Twenty, WordPress
I remember celebrating 15 years of WordPress. I wasn’t yet contributing directly to the larger open source project yet still felt the impact reverberate through my being. A lot has changed in five years. I’ve switched jobs twice and am now spending my days both deep in the future of what’s to come for WordPress and doing my best to bring others into that future (and present). Being a part of release squads for various WordPress releases has been humbling and the responsibility has been immense. As I said recently in a post about turning thirty, it feels amazing to…
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forget again
I took a mental health day and went on a hike. I saw a tree that looked like the perfect size to hug and walked right up to for an embrace it without thinking much about it. Memories of looking at trees to hug came flooding back from the pandemic. Why don’t we talk about those times more? Is it just me who still is looping through memories and processing that strange time? I finally feel I’m in a state to reflect and even that’s a privilege. Hugging the tree felt so empty and it shocked me a bit. How…
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Quick career tips for underrepresented folks in tech
While I’m not particularly ambitious or career oriented, I have both been given advice assuming I am by folks more advanced in their careers and am a generally observant person who likes to understand how systems work. With layoffs abounding in tech, I wanted to share a gathering of thoughts that I think underrepresented folks in general have to keep in mind. Curate and share your work publicly. Now that I’m sponsored to work in the open source WordPress.org community, I’m realizing how powerful it is to have my work on public display. For any future job, when I’m asked…
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took place
April 19th would have been my grandma’s birthday. 95, I think. Some of the folks I chat with at the nursing home talk about living to 110. She didn’t want that. I don’t talk to myself but I did that day. I talked for a few awkward minutes as if I was catching up with her. I told her about the three hour drive I was on to the Washington coast to see someone I love. I talked to her about my life in Seattle. I wondered what new books she’d read. I trailed off at the end as the…
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No choice
I just finished “Abandon Me” by Melissa Febos and wanted to pull out a few favorite quotes to return to, as otherwise it makes it hard to give away the books that already live in my brain. It’s a minimalistic compulsion. Sometimes I wonder if I read my physical books faster and more frequently purely out of desire to eventually be released from them. I want to explain this first quote and why it captured my attention. The book is a memoir and part of the story involves Melissa getting to know her biological dad, Jon. In the following, she’s…
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Creating art for 20 years of WordPress
Building off of my prior post on creating art and in light of launching a call for art submissions inspired by WordPress’ 20th anniversary, I’m sharing the various submissions I’m working on in case it inspires someone else to join in on the fun. Submissions are due by May 1st, 2023 so fire up your site soon and see where you land. This post will be lighter on details and will likely be edited as I create more pieces in my spare time. Working Title: The W Emerges For some reason, my go-to right now is to split a single…
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So you want to talk about the Site Editor? Part IV
As a follow up to a few prior posts I’ve written, I wanted to share a much more contained, semi-6.2 related update as this marks a big step forward in the experience, resulting in the removal of the beta label. For completeness, here are the prior posts: So you want to talk about Full Site Editing?, So you want to talk about FSE? 5.9 Edition, and So you want to talk about FSE? Part III. I recommend reviewing them as I try as much as possible to only share new information in each so the posts can build upon each…
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complete
The second I started to write a note to my friend congratulating her on expecting a baby boy, I removed the item from my list on my phone, lost forever. The familiar feeling of “well, now I really need to see this through” passed through my brain. I never really stopped to observe this habit of removing a task before the task is done but I do it all the time and likely have for years. It’s a brilliant focus technique tailored just to my strange brain that loves to check things off a to do list yet also is…
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30
I don’t remember my twentieth birthday. I don’t know what I did, who I was with, or how I felt the day my twenties began. I can remember the surrounding circumstances — nearly needing to switch schools before finding a way to graduate early, the one year mark of my ACL recovery, a breakup with my first official girlfriend, meeting my next, and getting even deeper in my understanding (and excitement) of this software called WordPress. I’m enjoying wondering what the bookend on the opposite side of this decade that I now find myself in entailed. I likely journaled about…
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WordPress 6.2 Source of Truth
Since becoming a sponsored contributor in the wider WordPress community in 2020, I noticed the same problem repeating with each release: how can one get the most accurate information about the entirety of a release as quickly and painlessly as possible? I noticed it across both Automattic (where I work) and the community as teams rallied together to update docs, training materials, and more. The lack of a “one stop shop” led to a lot of duplicated efforts tracking down the same information, incorrect information getting out, delays in preparing for a release, and more. To attempt to solve this,…
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one pedal at a time
At least once a year, I reach a point of wanting to do something I don’t think I can. During the pandemic, it was 15 pull-ups in a row. At other points, it’s been long hikes or repeating college rugby fitness tests. It comes from both the urge for my insides to match my outsides (I’m working through something emotionally and symbolically working through something very hard physically helps me do that) and as a ritual of mental fortitude. It is ultimately so mental. At some point this week, I decided I was going to bike 50 miles. I’d only…
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instead
I scrambled up to my apartment’s rooftop to catch the sunrise and was stunned by this view instead.
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lightning of loss
2022 saw an immense amount of grief for me and taught me, once more, the horrible lesson that the culture I exist in doesn’t make space for it. When folks can’t fix something, there’s a seeming unwillingness to ask about the unfixable and to walk alongside someone with a heavy heart. Some grief has been invisible, like grieving the lost time with my birthmom’s family that I’ll never be able to make up. I excused folks for not understanding this less obvious, more nuanced grief. When my grandma died, I was nearly relieved to have a very visible, societally sanctioned…
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chose to be open
What an unexpected yet intentional year of openness, grief, exploring what it feels like to be settled, and finding a place that feels like home (for now). I can’t help but think of my grandma as 2023 creeps closer. It’s a year she’ll never touch. A year without memories of her. A year without notes in my journal about conversations I had with her. It’ll be the first year of her absence. I fear I’ll fear that loss with each time I write down the date. I set out last year to continue nomading. I lived in Oregon for a…
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stacked places
I’ve been having a lot of overlapping conversations with wildly different people. The kinds of conversations that bleed and build into each other. The kinds of conversations that makes me want to report back to each person I’ve spoken with to catch them up on the latest ideas/thoughts/feelings formed from their own. It reminds me of classes in college where at a certain point my papers would pull in ideas from two or three different classes, better reflecting the complexity of the world at large. All of this is to say, I listened to a podcast where a friend talked…
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Behind the scenes of creating art with WordPress
It’s been nearly a year since the launch of the Block Museum, a virtual art exhibit of art pieces made with different versions of WordPress. In that time span, three WordPress releases have come out with ever greater tools for creativity. Meanwhile, the Block Museum opened to submissions, introduced an interactive exhibit, and a few pieces were featured subtly in the State of the Word (circular rainbow and splitting) pictured below: While anyone can view how each piece is made code wise, I thought it would be fun to pull the curtain back a bit more on this favorite side…
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tiny feelings
At varying points in our lives, we’re each told what is and isn’t okay to feel. It’s a normal part of a society that teaches right/wrong, bad/good, etc. Sometimes we get this wrong though or we internalize a small moment that was a mere passing comment made without much thought in another person’s life. This is what underpins the art of unlearning and finding our way again as we get older. Some never do and admonish me for unladylike things. Others help me see a path to feel things I didn’t think I could. Thinking about and feeling much of…
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ways to go
I sometimes forget that I work in tech, ignoring different headlines as boring and instead opting to read about more compelling matters. At Automattic, where I work, slack has been ablaze with the glorious ChatGPT. I’ll let you google the details but at its simplest it’s a AI-powered chat bot. After having it write some very silly poems for a warm up, I posed the question: “What makes surrogacy problematic?” Here’s a screenshot I immediately took after it spit this out: What about the children born from surrogacy? What about the entire premise of why surrogacy is done? Out of…
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extreme alignment
I looked around me at pick-up soccer today in a random pause in the game. I felt such extreme alignment in living the life I want — in showing up for people, in keeping in touch from afar, in keeping my heart open, in speaking truth, in working hard, in resting and not getting caught up, on and on. I felt it deeply rooted in me and soaked it up. The ball was played in and I chased after it with a big smile on my face knowing that today was so good.
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even when
My grandma was paralyzed on half of her body for most of my life. It impacted her dominate side so, since I was 12 or so, I watched her navigate both asking for help and being wildly independent (to the point that that independence is what also led to her death in many ways). I’d park myself in her wheelchair, scoot up next to her, and talk for hours. We had the same sized hands and I wear two of her rings on my thumbs each day. When I was six, my brother slammed my left hand in our big…
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