Shane's Blog/Vlog
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!
The Anniversary headphones came and they are awesome!
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.
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.
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.
This is by far the hardest one. I am happy with the progress
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. 🙂
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.
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.
Still working on this through personal development, books and such. Not much to update on here.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interested? Apply!
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/wpThen 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.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!
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.
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="$i"
sleep 5
doneSave the above into a file.
vi sites.sh:wqchmod and make executable chmod 766 sites.sh./sites.sh | tee site.logSome of the amazing devs at work helped to modify the loop a bit to make it better for logging.
!/bin/bash
sites=($(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
I had a great time with my wife and my team (Tatooine) in Hawaii. We were there 12 days total. The only thing I would change is the location in Hawaii. Honolulu is very crowded. It’s a big city that felt like Los Angeles, only the driving was 100 times worse. It was hot and humid as well. If I was to go back to Hawaii I would choose a different island.
We rented a car for 7 days and left the city several times. Those were the best days! That’s when Hawaii was a lot more fun for me, the beauty and the draw of Hawaii became apparent. We snorkeled, went on many hikes to beautiful water falls, light houses and jungle like destinations. We even did a dinner cruise that turned out to be one of my most favorite things, that along with the ATV tour of Jurassic Valley.
The times with my team were fun as well. There was another team on meetup in Hawaii (Go Sparta!) and our hotels were close together, so we were able to do some cross training and general hang outs. Typically what we do is have our own rooms and then we get the penthouse suite as a common area, which is what we did this time. That made for some really fun evenings playing games and getting to know each other better.
The next meetup needs to be somewhere cold. We are talking about Amsterdam or maybe Lisbon, Portugal. That’s more my speed. 🙂 The Grand Meetup is in 5 months, we return to Florida for the second year in a row. I am really spoiled weather wise being from the Bay Area.
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!
