Last night I gave a short talk at the WordPress Louisville meetup. The idea of child themes had been mentioned tangentially during other talks, but I thought I’d explain them head-on for a few minutes. My slides (including the couple videos) are in the Cloudup stream below, along with a few links.
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The monthly WordPress meetup is upon us! I’ll be talking child themes, Scott Gilbertson is going over image optimization, and we have another guest speaker showing off some professional WordPress creations.
It’s a laid-back meeting with lots of opportunities for questions, discussion, and finding help for any problems you may have with your own projects.
RSVP to attend on the Meetup.com event.
http://www.meetup.com/WordPress-Meetup-Louisville/events/231754478/
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Back in December Ber made her intentions clear. Once the baby was here and she was cleared to exercise again, she wanted to get back to running. She decided to run in the Throo the Zoo 5k, which happens every year at the Louisville Zoo on the 2nd Saturday in May (the week after Derby.) Her enthusiasm spread throughout our family Christmas and my sister, Julie, said that she’d love to come down and join her for the run in May.
Fast forward to the spring and the time had come. Grace is here and healthy, and Ber was cleared to run once more. Her best friend and running partner, Kirsten, joined the team. Kirsten’s fiancé, Cory, joined alongside her. I’ve been jogging and working out for several months, so I decided I would run as well (so long as we could get a babysitter – Grandma was excited to help with that.) Together we formed Team Owlbear.
It proved to be a cool, cloudy day – perfect for a race. All had a good time!
Pre-race
Alex and Julie
Team Owlbear + staring guyFinish Line
Team Owlbear’s results -
I was interviewed about my experience with Automattic’s awesome parental leave policy for an article in th Los Angeles Times. Ended up not being too important to the article, but it’s still cool to see.
Why so few take paid parental leave by Natalie Kitroeff
A day after Alex Gustafson’s wife gave birth to their daughter in December, he officially began the 12 weeks of fully paid family leave offered by Automattic Inc., the San Francisco tech company where he works.
A couple points of clarification for my side of it…
Automattic is based out of San Francisco, but we’re fully distributed. You can work from anywhere you like. I live and work in Louisville, KY. We’re also hiring.
12 weeks of paid leave is also just what I took. The policy is more flexible that that. You could easily arrange more unpaid time, and potentially more paid time. You can spread that time out over more spurts instead of all in one go. All it takes is a bit of communication with your team lead and our lovely, helpful HR folks. We communicate all the time anyway so the whole process is easy. Having a new baby is hard enough.
The article is still worth a read, and isn’t really meant to be about Automattic. Natalie did a great job and it was pleasure to chat with her.
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For once my cat decided to hangout behind my monitor, instead of right in front of it.
This adorable change of events will likely never happen again.
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After reading Getting Things Done by David Allen, I was excited to get to work. With clarity about my system and tools, I made better Next Steps and forced myself to confront the things I could do and what I needed to defer or delegate.
But on some items, I found myself running in circles. Things big enough that a Next Step would be the planning and thinking about what would make a good next step.
What I needed was project management. The ability to break down big, ambitious tasks with multiple parts into a series of next steps.
GTD falls short on material of how to handle project management. Where David Allen left off, Cesar Abeid picks us up. Reading Project Management For You is like unlocking some hidden bonus chapters of GTD.
I came across this book because I’m lucky enough to call Cesar my friend and colleague. Before our recent team meetup in Austin, Texas, I was making a point to learn more about my fellow teammates. Whenever you become a new Automattician, one of your first tasks is to make a p2 post introducing yourself. Cesar mentioned his book in his intro post, so I added it to my Kindle for one of my plane rides.
Project Management For You on Kindle with avid reader cat, Bagheera What a great decision! In addition to being the missing sibling to GTD, it was short enough to be read in a few hours on the plane and had some great stories that helped me get to know Cesar.
Cesar and I got to have some good talks about projects and productivity on that meetup. In particular I wanted to hear him speak more on the distinction between projects and operations he makes in the book.
For something to be a project, it has to have an end. You’ve made the thing, you completed the task, and it’s done. Ring the bell – ding! But operations are ongoing. Cesar’s example is that writing a book is a project, but marketing, promoting, and selling it is operations. It’s easy to make the mistake of trying to use project tools to improperly manage operations.
In my work of customer support, I’m in operations. There’s little chance of people not wanting help anytime soon. The chats and emails will keep coming in and we continue to find the best ways to answer them quickly and helpfully.
But Automatticians love projects. We obsess over chances to do a sprint of work once that will pay off multiple times in the future. To the point that sometimes we start to see projects where we should be thinking of how to optimize operations.
The appendix to Cesar’s book helps with this too! Using Agile concepts, you can shift most operations into successive projects. Getting his perspective and advice on this was invaluable for me in person. Unless you have that opportunity yourself, I recommend you check out the book as well as his podcast, PM for the Masses. Here’s an episode with an inteview of David Allen!
Project Management For You by Cesar Abeid, part of my 2016 Reading
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Shadows Over Innistrad, the new block of cards for Magic: the Gathering, officially goes on sale Friday. Last weekend I got to play in a prerelease sealed deck tournament at the Louisville Game Shop to get an early experience with these new cards.
During a pre-release tournament, each player is a given a special box of six booster packs from the new block to make a deck with a minimum of 40 cards. You also get a special promotional card for your collection, and prizes awarded to the top players. At our event each person in the tournament also got a couple extra Shadows Over Innistrad booster packs (that couldn’t be used in your tournament deck.)
Once everyone is registered and has their pack, you only get 30 minutes to make your deck before playing the first match. That’s actually my favorite part: quickly opening up all your new cards, examining them briefly, and whittling it down to an efficient 40(ish) cards with a simple plan to win.
I looked at going for Red+Black for the cheap creatures, some with transfrom, but didn’t have any options for a heavy hitter with those colors and couldn’t think through what my plan would be. If I had more werewolves maybe Red+Green would’ve worked.
Three mythic rares were included in my pack. Each stood out as a potential finisher.
Archangel Avacyn that transforms into Avacyn, the Purifier was a pretty obvious win condition. She was even on one of the event posters. Then I saw how many flyers I had overall and how well my Blue cards allowed for Investigation.
My plan became clear: Blue+White flyers, and investigate as much as possible to help my draw and increase chances of getting Avacyn, Geralf’s Masterpiece, and my last big flyer, Reaper of Flight Moonsilver.
Avacyn, the Purifier It’s a simple deck and wasn’t an overwhelming winner, but it was something I knew I could play. To start, I used every blue card I had then added all my white flyers. Since my blue strategy was mostly Investigation, Tamiyo’s Journal became an obvious artifact to thrown in there too.
Tamiyos Journal would let me sacrifice 3 clues to search my library for any of my heavy hitters from the deck. Oh, and it ensures I gain at least one clue every turn too – convenient!
After that five more white cards made the cut: Inspiring Captain, while not a flyer, is a formidable 3/3 with a buff for my whole board. Survive the Night provided more Investigation, with some buffing as a bonus. Silverstrike and Angelic Purge were my best removal spells in the whole pack (my black options were really disappointing.) And finally, Chaplain’s Blessing is 5 life for 1 mana — too good of a deal to pass up.
Finish it up with 18 land, split between Islands and Plains, and I had a 41 card deck.
My Deck
Artifacts
- Tamiyo’s Journal (Rare)
White
- Angelic Purge
- Apothecary Geist
- Archangel Avacyn (Mythic Rare)
- Chaplain’s Blessing
- Inspiring Captain
- Reaper of Flight Moonsilver
- Silverstrike
- Survive the Night
- Topplegeist
Blue
- Drownyard Explorers x2
- Erdwal Illuminator
- Furtive Homunculus
- Geralf’s Masterpiece (Mythic Rare)
- Nagging Thoughts
- Niblis of Dusk
- Press for Answers
- Silent Observer
- Sleep Paralysis
- Stitched Mangler
- Trail of Evidence
- Vessel of Paramnesia
Land
- Plains x9
- Island x9
Also in my prerelease pack I got a couple other rare cards in other colors:
- The Gitrog Monster (Mythic Rare)
- Falkenrath Gorger (Rare)
- Ever After (Rare)
- Tireless Tracker (Rare)
The promotional card for the event was “Foreboding Ruins,” a pretty cool red/black dual land.
I felt good about the deck, and even looking back, I don’t think I’d change anything about the build – only my play.
There were four rounds in the tournament, but I only played the first three as I had dinner arrangements to get to. In those three rounds, I lost (0-2), drew (1-1-1), and lost (1-2).
I found the Investigate-heavy strategy worked pretty well. I got at least one of my big flyers out almost every game, and never felt totally hosed. I just didn’t always have ways to handle more aggressive creatures. Could’ve really used more removal spells or de-buffs.
The sealed deck format of these prerelease events is a lot of fun. If you’re like me and don’t have a large collection of cards nor many other friends who play, it levels the playing field on what cards are available and provides a place to meet new folks for a game.
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For the last week or so I’ve tried something new. After listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast episode with Josh Waitzkin, I decided to try out a bit of meditation during my morning routines.
To get started, I’m using Headspace.
For ten minutes a day, I do what Andy says and I get a little closer to understanding where my mind is. Eight days in now, I’m starting to find in my sessions that the real value isn’t in the ten minutes of being calm but in what thoughts come up in those ten minutes.
An example: I’m more anxious about my fitness than I thought.
My CrossFit workout on Monday didn’t go as I’d like. I was upset while it was happening – I got over it afterwards. Or so I thought.
But this morning while meditating it just kept coming up. I could almost see myself panting on the floor of the gym.
The cool thing about meditation though is that thoughts like these don’t take over your mind, it’s more that you watch them pass by.
Imagine sitting on your front porch and you notice a blue car drive by and turn at the end of your block. No big deal. But then a minute late that same blue car drives by again. And again another minute later. The car is driving in circles – weird!
That’s what an anxious thought feels like when you’re meditating. It keeps coming up, and you’ll notice it, but it doesn’t take over your mind the way it does when you actually feel anxiety.
So now I’m back in my normal state, and I can logically think about this. What can I do differently? Should I talk to my coaches that I’m worried about how yesterday went? Was that workout just hard and any beginner would’ve felt the same? Maybe I’m not scaling back my workouts enough? Perhaps there’s something obvious I’m missing, like not enough fruit or water before the workout?
Those are next steps, not the worries of an anxious mind, and next steps can be acted upon.
If it weren’t fitness, it would be something else. Your mind isn’t static, there will be thoughts popping up even when you’re calm and meditating.
But consider this a new diagnostic tool for what’s going on in your mind. 10 minutes a day is a small price to pay if it helps you figure out what really is causing any worry, grief, or stress during all your other waking hours.
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Recently I hit a cool benchmark of 10,000 points on the technology education website, Treehouse. I really like what they offer and really owe a lot of my career to them. I guarantee you, without learning what I’ve learned from them I never would’ve been hired at Automattic.
In celebration of those points, I decided I needed to get some Treehouse stickers on my laptop. I remembered they had a swag store up at one point, but they took it down. Not to be deterred, I emailed their support team and they offered to send me some stickers to celebrate the occasion. They also added a cool “Thanks!” card with a hand-written note inside!
Mike the Frog now gets to chill along with Wapuu and friends on my laptop.
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I try to avoid being overwhelmed simply by avoiding tasks. Ever invited me to something? I got all cringy and didn’t want to talk about going to it, right? Yeah – I avoid tasks. It’s not a social anxiety thing, it’s a “I have way too much stuff asking for my time to sign up for yet another party/event/whatever” thing.
This should only be one tool in your toolbox. At some point you have to reckon with the responsibilities you do accept.
In the last few years, I’ve gotten better. I embraced the idea of putting thoughts into a calendar and task manager and working off those instead of trying to work off whats in my head.
Accepting that brains are bad at remembering things was easy. I think more clearly when I’m not trying to remember things.
A lot of these ideas I got from blog posts online and two names popped up a lot: David Allen and Merlin Mann. I never totally followed either of them, but the trend was obvious. One day I was in a used bookstore and saw a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen, so I snagged it.
Getting Things Done in paperback with avid reader cat, Bagheera And never read it. D’oh.
I never learned the remaining tools I needed to make use of all these lists and calendar appointments with best efficiency. I even complained about this on a post, To-Do Debt.
My colleague Bryan read the post, empathized with me, and wrote a follow-up on his blog: Battling To Do Debt.
He had some great advice, and also mentioned reading GTD, so it went on the reading list instead of just my bookshelf. I finally did it!
The book did commit one of my pet peeves: it spends several paragraphs of its opening chapters making promises about what I’ll learn by reading on. Snore. I already own the book, get to the point.
What follows after that is a document you immediately want to read again, as you follow its advice. It’s odd because once you’re about halfway through, every time you pick up the book you ask yourself, “should I read more or spend some time doing what I’ve already learned from it?” The only answer I have is “plan to read it more than once.” Then it doesn’t matter how many times you put it down to get stuff done.
Thankfully I had already done some of the hard work. I’m not in overwhelm mode and my mind is mostly dumped. But there’s more efficiency to be had,for sure.
For the Olympic weightlifter, the title is won with efficiency not just strength. The same is true for work. Efficiency with your tools and planning can push you much further than just worker harder for more hours.
The biggest new habits GTD has convinced me of is to focus on Next Steps and to hold Weekly Reviews. My biggest pitfall that lead to “to do debt” (as I called it) was trying to use my to-do list as a habit changer. Really I should use thought-out next steps as the habit changer and not be scared to leave some things on a Someday/Maybe list. So long as a I have my Weekly Review, the Somedays will be seen and maybe allowed to be a project with a Next Step.
I even convinced Ber to do a portion of my Weekly Review with me to make sure we’re on the same wavelength.
So I guess what I’m saying is: it’s a good book if you’re ready to work.
Getting Things Done by David Allen, part of my 2016 Reading
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Alex "Gus" Gustafson 