Beau Lebens
Building the web, enjoying the wild.
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Automattic at 20
Automattic turned 20 this year. That alone is worth celebrating — it’s rare for a tech company to make it this far, let alone one that’s been fully distributed from day one. For me, it’s also a personal milestone: I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last 16 of those 20 years working to make the web a better place. I joined in 2009 after meeting a group of talented folks on the internet (as one did in those days), then somehow found myself at Matt’s house for a WordPress “upgrade party.” That was the beginning — I never imagined…
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Keyring 3.0
Well it’s been a while, but I’ve just pushed a 3.0 release of Keyring. Keyring is a generalized framework for WordPress which handles authentication with, and authenticated requests to remote services. It provides a set of predefined “Services” which describe how to communicate with a collection of popular platforms, and also makes it easy for you to plug into that framework and define your own Services for other systems. This version includes a bunch of improvements and compatibility updates, including all sorts of contributions from other folks. There are a lot of fixes and tweaks that have come back into…
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Business, Product, and Marketing Concepts for Engineers
I worked as a full stack engineer/developer for many years before going into more leadership type positions, where an understanding of the business itself became much more important than specific product experiences, features, or codebases. Along that journey I’ve needed to learn a lot of acronyms and concepts that aren’t a part of pure engineering, and would like to summarize some of the more fundamental pieces below in case they’re useful for others making a similar transition. A lot of this is likely to come across as very basic for anyone who’s spent time thinking about these sorts of things…
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Replacing Wink with Home Assistant
I used to have Wink set up, managing some smart home devices throughout our house. I liked it because the app UI was quite nicely done, and it seemed to be compatible with “everything”. I had even upgraded from their version 1 hub, to the version 2. But then a few months ago they decided (somewhat out of the blue) that they were going to start charging a subscription fee. Coupled with some recent outages and frequent command delays, and it was the “motivation” I needed to invest in a Home Assistant system, and move away from Wink entirely. Set…
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Using Dynalist as a Productivity Tool
I’ve been searching for years for the “perfect tool” to help me take notes, organize ideas, and keep track of all the tasks I need to do. I’ve also been deeply obsessed with lists forever. At some point I came across Workflowy, which I quite liked. I don’t remember why, but I then discovered and switched over to Dynalist.io. I don’t know if it’s the perfect tool, but I’ve adapted a way of using it that’s working well for me. I now pay for a yearly subscription, and use it for most things. The Big Idea The big idea for…
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Remote Work At Scale
COVID-19 (aka coronavirus) has many companies suddenly experimenting with remote work for the first time. I tweeted yesterday that unfortunately people are likely to have a pretty rough time due to the rushed nature of the experiment, and some folks asked if I could expand on that, so here we are. There are already a bunch of write-ups, resources, and tools if you look around (including one from our CEO Matt, and this great webinar-format session from Cate and Nicole), so it’s worth getting other views and ideas as well. We’ll look at some concepts that I think underpin successful…
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Management Communication: Priority Exceptions
Constantly-changing priorities and surprise projects erode team morale and leave everyone unsure of if they’re working on the most important thing, or if they’ll ever get to finish anything. While being adaptable and flexible is critical for most teams, it’s always important to have some kind of roadmap and approach to prioritization and planning work. There are many different ways to plan and prioritize your work; what’s important is that when priorities change — and they will change — you acknowledge that change and adapt quickly. If you don’t clearly acknowledge the change in plans, your team can start to…
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Arc’teryx Norvan SL Hoody Review
Before we get into any details, let me just get this out of the way — I absolutely love this thing, and giggle every time I get to use it. It makes no sense, I know, but here we are. OK — now that you know how biased I am, let’s jump into some details. I have the black and red, size Large. I’m 6’4″ and have bizarrely long arms, but the Norvan SL Hoody fits as well (if not better) than most standard long-sleeve items I get my hands on, and isn’t too baggy around the body. When I…
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Engineering Management Lessons From Mountain Biking
Since moving to Colorado, I’ve been lucky enough to get out mountain biking pretty frequently. I love it. On some rides you’re just trying to get up or down the mountain in one piece, but on some rides you get good time to think quite deeply. On a recent ride I was rolling around (pun intended, you’re welcome) some ideas about engineering management, and realized there are some good parallels between mountain biking and leading teams of engineers. Look Out Ahead When you’re riding single track, it’s really common to have your eyes glued to the trail right in front…