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An Embarrassing First Release

June 6, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve talked before about my idea of shipping a “strong 1.0” when it comes to working on projects for yourself or other people but what if that version is an embarrassing first release?

There’s a quote that many of us are familiar with (and that I’ve referenced here before, too):

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you’ve launched too late.

It’s attributed to Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.

I think it’s something that’s good to remember, but sometimes I wonder if we use it as a crutch when shipping something and as a rationalization to cut corners.

Timedropper – A jQuery Time Plugin

June 3, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

There’s some programmer joke that says there are two things hard in computer science: naming things and time zones. On second thought, maybe that’s not the joke at all (because it sounds too true to be funny).

Whatever. The point of this post isn’t to try to make jokes, but to share something useful for working with time zones in the context of JavaScript.

Specifically, I’m talking about Timedropper. It’s a cool jQuery time plugin designed to make it easy for you to implement options into your web application that gives users an intuitive way to work with time.

Postmatic for WordPress Comments (and So Much More!)

June 2, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

In November 2014, I stumbled across Postmatic which aimed to make WordPress comments a bit easier to manage (for those who end up getting any form of comments on your blog).

Postmatic for WordPress Comments

Since then, I’ve written several posts about the service. These articles span from 2014 up through the middle of last year:

And to this day, I’m still a fan. Jason, Dylan, and the rest of the team (along with some help from guys like Carl and Josh) have continued to put together an amazing service that makes responding to comments that much easier.

I know: This first little bit sounds a little bit like a sales pitch, and that isn’t my style, so I’ll refrain from talking about the plugin and the service from that angle anymore.

But I will say that I’ve been using Postmatic since the beginning and following up with comments has always been much more pleasant of an experience when I can do it from my inbox.

As the product keeps maturing, more and more useful features are being built into it.

Proposed WordPress Employee Benefits

June 1, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Though I don’t run a big WordPress agency or a large WordPress shop or anything like that, I often wonder what would a WordPress employee benefits package look like for those who do run those types of shop.

I’m not talking about the standard run-of-the-mill benefits like insurance, retirement, paternity, vacation, maternity leave, paternity leave, etc. I mean, those are all great – don’t get me wrong – but I’m talking about the kinds of things that businesses could offer to their employees that would help them invest in themselves and their career.

Not only would this benefit the employees, but it could help the company, as well.

Social Media and Curtailing the Thrashing

May 31, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

At a high-level, computers work by taking information that’s frequently accessed on the hard disk and loading it into RAM so that when a running application needs it again, it can access it in RAM rather than from the hard drive itself.

The idea behind this is so that it improves performance and this is why having a lot of memory can often give you increased performance. Today, it’s not uncommon to have 16GB of RAM available in a computer, so the amount of information that can be held in RAM is pretty impressive.

Let’s say that you’re running some intense applications, or you’re working with a demanding application, and you’re exhausting the available RAM. What happens then? At this point, the computer ends up thrashing. Sounds like fun (if you’re at a hard rock concert, maybe), right? But the gist of it is that you end up taking information in RAM, writing it back to disk, and then replacing that data with new data from the disk.

Wikipedia defines it like this:

In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer’s virtual memory subsystem is in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, to the exclusion of most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse greatly.

The emphasis added is my own because it’s ultimately the point I want to bring up as it relates to the rest of this post.

Tom McFarlin

An Embarrassing First Release

Timedropper – A jQuery Time Plugin

Postmatic for WordPress Comments (and So Much More!)

Proposed WordPress Employee Benefits

Social Media and Curtailing the Thrashing