Category: Work

Musings on work

Recent updates

So I’ve updated my portfolio a bit – it’s been way too long! Unfortunately there’s too many projects I’ve worked on to add to my portfolio in a meaningful way – what I mean is that I don’t have time or the energy to do the necessary write-ups justice. So I had to pick and choose. I hope I captured a good overview of what I’ve been working on. If you have any questions about a particular project, let me know. I’ve also updated the resume. Of particular note is that I’m now Scrum Master certified.

Also I absolutely love the inktraps on Ropa Soft Pro’s italics. Particularly at medium weight and above. Perhaps a bit distracting, but I still love the boldness of it.

2014 – Recap

It’s that time again where we flip the calendar over to a new year. Still no personal jetpacks and as always, flying cars are as far away as ever. But now everyone can fly drones (does that count as a win?).

Awesome Things That Happened In 2014
Visited family in Nevada. Fun to hang out and just chill with the in-laws and watch great-grandparents enjoy great-grandchildren. Kid #2 discovered the joy of swinging…for hours on end which started to drive mommy and daddy nuts. Fortunately Aunt J., Uncle J., and Grandpa helped out with the pushing.

Got to visit Hawaii’s Big Island. I would like to visit it again sometime. Absolutely fascinating place, expensive, but totally worth it. Really enjoyed being with family and just relaxing for a week on a tropical paradise (albeit a bit warmer than I’d like – but hey, I’m not going to complain).

Major accomplishments at work which was recognized with a significant raise. Yeah, I need to update my portfolio and resume to highlight these accomplishments.

Scrum Master certified (part of my work accomplishments). At work we’re trying to become more agile in our processes – it’s starting to pay-off as projects move faster and clients communicate better. While we can’t implement everything that Scrum has to offer, the changes we have been able to make are really improving our client buy-in and interactions.

Kid #1 going to Kindergarten and loving it. Teacher says she’s doing extremely well. It’s fun to hear her describe what she’s learning

Kid #2 almost getting to potty trained status. Still a few accidents but in general doing well.

I finished reading Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull of Pixar/Disney fame. I strongly suggest reading it as Ed discusses the challenges of creating and maintaining a creative and productive work environment. It really dovetails well into agile processes and approaches like Scrum.

Lets see. I also finished Logicomix – an amazing graphic novel that explores logic, mathematics, philosophy and the beginnings of computer science through the life and experiences of Bertrand Russell. As the authors note, it’s a graphic novel first and foremost. But the stories, the people and ultimately the questions and answers discovered are very real and have a profound impact on our lives today. While done in a very approachable way, the ideas and concepts are not “dumbed” down. Highly recommended.

Kid #2 and I both got fevers for our b-days. Not cool or fun but we’re over it now. Family is now generally healthy. Grateful for that.

Christmas was a success. Everyone got what they needed. While we missed not being with the rest of our families, it was still nice to be at home with our immediate family. Oh and not have problems with our furnace, yes, that was nice.

Anyway, that’s the news from Michigan where all our kids are crazy and fun, the wife is an amazing pie baker, and I’m doing pretty good.

A very useful WordPress code snippet to know…

As I was working on a custom WordPress theme (based on _s) I found myself trying to get the slug of a post to use as a class for additional styling. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t have a get_the_slug() function or a the_slug() function. Well, not built out like that at any rate. The “why not?” is basically because the global $post object contains that info and thus can be found already and no extra functions needed. And then I ran into this wonderful bit of code from TCBarret (code commenting is mine):

/*This function gets the slug of a post 
- you need this to use the next code snippet.
*/
function get_the_slug( $id=null ){
  if( empty($id) ):
    global $post;
    if( empty($post) )
      return ''; // No global $post var available.
    $id = $post->ID;
  endif;

  $slug = basename( get_permalink($id) );
  return $slug;
}

So again, the above code will get_the_slug();. Now to use it, we want a filter and echo out the filtered post ID as the_slug(). And that code is:

/*This adds a filter and allows us to display the results of the
get_the_slug() function noted above.
*/
function the_slug( $id=null ){
  echo apply_filters( 'the_slug', get_the_slug($id) );
}

How to use this? Well I decided to build out a little utility plugin which incorporates the above code so I can use it pretty much in any WordPress install – it’s not tied to a theme or what not. You can use the above code in a theme’s functions.php instead of a plugin but I think a plugin is a better choice as it means the functionality is usable across whatever theme you decide to use. Anyway, special thanks to TCBarret for his excellent (and very useful) code.