7 Years

Today marks 7 years at Automattic. The 4 were spent in WooCommerce and the last 3 have been in WordPress VIP. I turned 7 years old while at the VIP Grand Meetup here in Denver. (I’ll update this post with photos when I get home and settled.) I am so thankful to be working with such amazing and smart people on cutting edge technology that is used by 43% of the web. Here is to 7 more!

Update October 30th 2022

The Anniversary headphones came and they are awesome!

Sabbatical Update III

Month Three

This is it! The end of my 3 month sabbatical. I can’t believe how fast it went! This is really bitter sweet as it has been such an amazing experience to have three months of no work, but at the same time I miss it. I love what I do, I love my work people and I have had some FOMO for sure. I am ready to dive deep in, especially with all of the leveling up I have been doing.

I had four goals for my 3 month paid sabbatical, let’s see how I did.

I. FITNESS

Fitness was not as big of a success as I was hoping for. I did however get a lot of rest and that did me a lot of good. I am at a gym now and working out, just not as intensely as I would like. My wife and I are also eating right, so I would say this goal was modified. I am healthier and we have a lifestyle in place that will get us to being fit, it just did not happen over sabbatical.

II. Level Up!

I earned the Jr Pentester certificate at TryHackMe! I have a bit left on the Bug Bounty Hunter track at HackTheBox and I am hoping to take the eJPT certification test next month. I still have some work to do around network hacking, enumeration, and Injection before I feel confident enough to take on that 72 hour test.

III. Leadership Skills

This is by far the hardest one. I am happy with the progress

Sabbatical Update II

Month Two

Last month when I posted my Sabbatical Update I talked a bit about my 4 goals and where I was. I thought I’d do the same update, because it’s easy to reuse the post. 🙂

I. FITNESS

Last month around this time I had not yet started on the fitness goal, I totally blame both being busy and some profound laziness. But this month I have defeated laziness and settled into a fitness routine. I got a personal trainer with the goal of weight loss and muscle gain. It’s way different than CrossFit or HITT. It’s really focused on lifting heavy and isolating muscles, eating and rest. Yikes, eating. I eat 6 times a day, measured out healthy food and I am still not used to eating so much. Chicken, rice, potatoes, beef, veggies, etc. This is very different than any training I have done in the past, but I have to admit, despite the constant being sore, I really love it.

II. Level Up!

I have put HTB and THM on hold as I concentrate on getting the eJPT certification. It’s slow going, but I am making progress.

III. Leadership Skills

Still working on this through personal development, books and such. Not much to update on here.

IV. Rest

I am resting, but it’s a busy rest. I have taken my kids camping, done some road trips and enjoyed a lot of down time.

Sabbatical Update

Month One

My paid three months off started October 1st. Sadly my plans are not going as well as I had hoped. I have four goals I’d like to accomplish by the end of my Sabbatical in January of 2022. Goals I think are good. Maybe?

  1. Regain my pre-Covid fitness level.
  2. Level up on Python and build proficiency in Cybersecurity by spending several hours a day on HackTheBox, TryHackMe, and BugBounty. Ending in December with a eJPT certification and at least one bug bounty complete. I have wanted to advance in these areas for a long time, but just have not had the time. I enjoy this stuff so much. I am working on my Linux systems 100% of the time again, and I have really missed that.
  3. Improve my leadership skills.
  4. Rest.

Fitness

It’s been three weeks and my fitness goal has no progress. I am having trouble finding where to land. CrossFit again? HITT? Boxing? Heavy lifting? I just don’t know! I am forcing myself to do something by the end of this week and give whatever it is a few weeks at least, even if I hate it.

Level Up

This is the one area I am really making progress in. In three weeks I have learned so, so much. I am in the top 4% on TryHackMe, and I have almost completed the Pentester track on HackTheBox and the Bug Bounty track on HackTheBox Academy. I am also about 1/2 way through a Python book. So pretty solid here. I am spending about 4-6 hours a day on this goal.

Leadership Skills

This is a difficult one. Not just to accomplish, but to gauge progress on. I started on this about a year ago. I have some hard things that need doing, and it’s very exhausting to be honest. Career coaching and counseling play a big part in figuring this out. My mantra is simple. “I can’t lead others if I can’t lead myself”. So I am working on leading myself right now.

Rest

This one, I am pretty much just failing hard at. For good reason though. I am a dad. I am dad to many teens. I spend so, so much time driving kids to school, appointments, and events and such. Like it’s an insane amount of my time that goes to this stuff, not to mention just parenting and trying my best to love these kids and not burn out. The load is heavy, but it’s worth carrying, so I do. There is no sleeping in, there is no getting to bed early. I am still burning the candle at both ends, and it’s thankless work that frankly yields very little rewards in the now. It’s a long game I am playing and I hope that when it’s time for these kids to be adults, that they are good ones. I’ll rest when I am dead, right? Seriously though, I am trying to figure out how to build in rest. I do go for coffee after I drop off kids, and sometimes I go to a park and breath in the fall air, when it’s not filled with smoke and dust … because … Fresno.

I really did need this though. I am so thankful for where I work. A Sabbatical is one of the many, many amazing perks I enjoy working at Automattic (VIP). You might think about joining me, we are hiring.

Some Automattic Perks

Four perks I love at Automattic

Today as I was watching one of my favorite Twitch streams I had a deep sense of thankfulness for all the perks that my company offers. A guest speaker was talking about Toastmasters, and that made me suddenly remember that I want to join my local chapter, but also that I was first introduced to that concept when I was preparing to present at a WordCamp.

Here is a list of some of the things I am taking advantage of at Automattic. I am hoping these entice you to apply. You can see even more benefits of working at Automattic here.

  1. Coaching. I have had a career/life coach for the past year and that has been huge in my growth. I have really grown in my position and pretty soon here will take a logic and big next step. A huge part of my success has been my professional coach. Automattic contracts with some of the best coaches out there and I am very thankful.
  2. Reboot Leadership training. This was an intensive course that taught me a lot about leadership. I don’t think I ever would have taken this on my own. My team lead suggested this training and I am so glad I went through it.
  3. Hardware refreshes. Every 18 months I get a new computer. Sometimes it’s a Macbook, other times it’s a iMac. Just depends. My last update was my anniversary laptop. My Home office is pretty amazing.
  4. Never stop learning. All books and courses and software that I use to learn and grow and carry out my day to day tasks are totally covered by Automattic.

Interested? Apply!

Update WordPress Via WP-CLI

Updating WordPress via the CLI is pretty easy.

First make sure you have wp-cli installed. I’ll use my Linode as an example.

# wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar
--2021-08-02 03:09:12--  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar
Resolving raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)... 185.199.108.133, 185.199.109.133, 185.199.110.133, ...
Connecting to raw.githubusercontent.com (raw.githubusercontent.com)|185.199.108.133|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 6094557 (5.8M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘wp-cli.phar’

wp-cli.phar    100%[===========>]   5.81M  --.-KB/s    in 0.04s

2021-08-02 03:09:12 (140 MB/s) - ‘wp-cli.phar’ saved [6094557/6094557]

# chmod +x wp-cli.phar

# sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

Then it’s as simple as this:

# /usr/local/bin/wp core update

Updating to version 5.8 (en_US)...
Downloading update from https://downloads.wordpress.org/release/wordpress-5.8-no-content.zip...
Unpacking the update...
Cleaning up files...
File removed: wp-includes/css/dist/editor/editor-styles-rtl.css
File removed: wp-includes/css/dist/editor/editor-styles-rtl.min.css
File removed: wp-includes/css/dist/editor/editor-styles.css
File removed: wp-includes/css/dist/editor/editor-styles.min.css
4 files cleaned up.
Success: WordPress updated successfully.

Updates to the home office – Work with me!

I work for a great company. One of the many perks that I and my co-workers enjoy is a regular hardware refresh. That along with a paid three-month sabbatical encouraged every five years, home office, career coaching, time off (open vacation policy) and more! I am sharing so you come and work with me!

So it was time for a hardware refresh this month, and it was also time to pick out my four-year anniversary laptop. Though it’s been well over 5 years, I decided to go for it.

I took this opportunity to overhaul everything! Every 5 years we also get a new monitor, and I was more than happy to get a new one. I am ditching my two monitor setup for a single monitor that’s ultra-wide. Since I am no longer using an iMac I needed to find a webcam, and I have wanted to upgrade from the Yeti microphone to something a little better, since I also do some home recording.

I am very happy with the results. I’ll list the upgrades I chose below and after a few months I think I might review them. Photos of the office are coming soon!

I am thankful for where I work and very blessed to have such a great working environment at home. You might consider applying at Automattic, we are hiring!

Here is the updated office!

  1. Macbook Pro (M1) “W” laptop as a gift after 5 years at Automattic
  2. SAMSUNG G9 monitor. Sent the G9 back. Way too many issues. In it’s place is the Dell Ultrasharp 43 4K USB-C Monitor – U4320Q. It’s huge!
  3. OWC 14-Port Thunderbolt 3 Dock 
  4. Razer Kiyo Pro Webcam
  5. MOTU M2 2×2 USB-C Audio Interface
  6. Shure MV7 Podcast Microphone with boom
  7. beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro headphones
  8. BENQ Computer Monitor Light ScreenBar
  9. A Few Sound Control Lights

I kept my uplift standing desk, keyboard and mouse, as well as the Polk Audio speakers, subwoofer and Denon receiver that I really, really love.

Photos

Loop Through An Array

Today I needed to loop through the output of a command on the WP CLI. The most simple way I could think to do that was to save the output of the command into an array and loop through it.

What I did was use wp site list to get the subsites on a WordPress Multisite. I needed to pass each of those sites as an argument to a command and give it some time in between each execution since it was going to be database intensive. Here is what worked out well.

#!/bin/bash

subsites=($(wp site list --field=url))

for i in "${subsites[@]}"
do
wp my_command --url="$i"
sleep 5
done

Save the above into a file.

  1. vi sites.sh
  2. Add code and then save. :wq
  3. chmod and make executable chmod 766 sites.sh
  4. Execute it ./sites.sh | tee site.log

Update

Some of the amazing devs at work helped to modify the loop a bit to make it better for logging.

!/bin/bash

sites=($(wp site list --field=url --path=/var/www))
for i in "${sites[@]}"
do
    domain=$(echo "$i" | awk -F/ '{print $3}')
    wp my_command --url="$i" | tee /path/to/file-"$domain".log
done

Closing Party

Last night was the closing party which officially ends the Grand Meetup.

The party was held at Epcot Center not too far from our hotel. It was a blast! The food, the band (our own Automatticians), the fireworks, just an amazing experience as always! View the album here!

First Commit to WordPress Core

This week during the Grand Meetup I was in a class called “Contributing to Core”. It was such a great class in that I got an inside view to all things WordPress Core. By the end of class I had my very first commit to WordPress Core. The commit was a fix for #45028 that my co-worker filed during the class.