Category Archives: Life

Bath Time

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Remembering Jennifer

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Yesterday, Christmas Eve morning, Jennifer was shot multiple times and found dead at the scene.

As I unpreparedly rerun each increasingly fuzzy memory I have of her, I feel joy in remembering someone special I hadn’t considered in a while — and I pity the miserable person who was convinced that taking her life was their only solution.

My heavy-hearted sympathies go out to everyone that’s missing her today.

Paul’s 3rd Year

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My little furry man is 3 years old. In his third year, he learned to dance, wait, roll-over, shake with both hands, and is starting to heel when walking on a leash.

It’s really important to me that he have the best little puppy life I’m able to provide him. In the next year, I’m going to concentrate on helping him get barking and leash anxiety under control.

How I’ve changed in 10 years.

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I pulled into the McDonald’s drive-through tonight because I felt I earned a prize for a great week of work, and for getting a bunch of chores done I’ve been building up to for a while. Of course, as I pull up to order, a police car also pulls up immediately behind me.

23 year old me would have been scared about getting a ticket for something I felt I didn’t deserve.

33 year old me paid for his dinner.

He thanked me via the employee at the second window, I thanked him for his public service. It wasn’t until I got home and was shoveling salty, delicious fake-potatoes furiously into my old, weathered gullet, that I realized the difference 10 years will make.

Also, no ticket. Booyah.

Confessions of an Open Source Workaholic

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Hi, my name is John, and I’m an Open Source Software workaholic. I touched on it a bit in my WPCandy interview, and I thought I’d finish the story here with a few added thoughts.

I live in a great neighborhood on the east side of Providence, RI. I work from home, rarely drive my car (ignore the frequent road trips), and enjoy the luxury of being walking distance from food, laundry, spirits, and anything else I might need to live a happy and comfortable life.

By day, I work for Automattic. I love my job. I love my colleagues. I love everything about what I do. To say it’s a dream job is an understatement. I work on some really awesome stuff going on around WordPress.com, Jetpack, Gravatar, and try to poke my head into other interesting social bits as much as possible.

By night, I’m the lead developer of bbPress, BuddyPress, and maintain both of the bbPress.org and BuddyPress.org sites. I believe both projects are two of the strongest spokes attached to the WordPress hub, and it’s my pleasure and privilege to be so closely involved with them. I am passionate about their success and enjoy iterating and improving them both equally, and love to help their users whenever I can.

That said, I’m in a unique and misunderstood position.

I work 40+ hours at a job that I love. Most days when I’m done with work I switch gears to my hobbies; usually that’s bbPress and BuddyPress. Other days, I enjoy going to the park with my dog Paul, watching Netflix, or enjoying a nice meal with friends.

In 2010 and 2011, I had the pleasure of mentoring some really bright individuals as part of the Google Summer of Code and the Google Code In projects. Gautam Gupta, a 15 year-old student from India, placed 6th by working closely with me contributing to the first major release of bbPress in two years; helping to totally refactor bbPress into a plugin for WordPress, skyrocket its popularity, and reinvigorate something great that hadn’t had much attention in a while.

My point, is that working on the bb’s is not something I am directly paid by Automattic to do. Instead, my job at Automattic enables me the means to keep my skills sharp *and* work on the software that I love, at the same time; it allows me to spend my free time giving as much back to the community as I am willing and able to. I choose to concentrate on bbPress and BuddyPress.

While Automattic does donate the time of several full-time people directly back into WordPress, and while it benefits Automattic as a business to be coupled so closely to its active development, it is not Automattic’s responsibility to staff anyone to contribute back to any open source project anymore than it is your own to do the same.

WordPress is free and open for anyone to build off of and dedicate resources towards. The bb’s are both free and open like WordPress is, with a lower barrier of entry to make a a much larger impact. If you’ve ever been intimidated by the amount of activity happening around the development of WordPress, or have been afraid your contributions aren’t good enough: 1. you’re wrong; 2. use the bb’s as your training ground.

If you choose to stick around and help work on the bb’s, your influence carries more weight because there are fewer people contributing. Dedicated contributors walk up the ranks quickly, earning core commit access like Boone Gorges, Paul Gibbs, and I with both BuddyPress and bbPress. We’re not the founding developers, we’re the currently active ones, and we would love to have your help. From code to codex, everything is an iterative work-in-progress.

Who knows, maybe eventually you’ll be an open source workaholic, too.

Paul is 2 years old today

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I used to be a cat person… I blame Garfield for this – his snarky wit and ability to own any situation was, in my youth, something I actually looked up to. Then I got fat because I was lazy and ate lasagna all day, so my parents made me start riding my bike to school. One day the neighbor’s dog nipped at my ankle, made contact, and that pretty much was it for me and dogs. When I was old enough to have real actual role models, the cat thing stuck and the thought of befriending a dog never once crossed my mind.

Looking back, I may have missed out on some good times.

The weirdest thing about my conversion to being a dog person is before I met Paul, I already had a dog by proxy of my girlfriend at the time. Lucy was, make no mistake, her dog. If there was confusion about this the cute green collar and occasional pink sweater would hopefully help dispel any doubt.

I needed another man in the house. That’s when I met Paul, or rather, Paul met me I suppose. We rolled into Homestead to the same breeder Lucy was from, and there he was – twice the size of his two sisters, and therefore half the price for double the cuteness.

Sold.

When Paul was old enough to come home he slept on my lap the entire 45 minute drive from Homestead, like we were both at peace together. He’s been everything I forgot a dog could be: friend, follower, psychologist… you name it, he’s been there, and he still loves falling asleep in my lap in the car. It’s pretty adorable.

So today is Paul’s 2nd birthday. We went on extra long walks, he got a new squirrel, and he’s full of his favorite treats. He really is my best friend; something that I probably would have made fun of or brushed off as weird a few years ago. He’s a cool little dude, and everyday I’m thankful and appreciative for the chain of events that brought my little puppy soulmate and I together.

Love you Paultergeist!