One of the things I wanted to do during my sabbatical (more on that later this week) was to create (from scratch) a new block theme for my site. I haven’t done this in a long time and thought it’d be a good way to get familiar with the state of block themes as a whole. In my role at WooCommerce I’ve been working deep in different parts of the block and site editors but haven’t spent as much time building things, for fun. Today, I launched the theme on my site. It’s not packaged for public distribution – if there’s interest I might – as I consider my design skills “highly niche” so might just stay bespoke for a while. I’ll do a full write up on the experience at some point.
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Sabbatical, a Gift
I’m sitting here writing this post, with a few days left in my 3 month Sabbatical. One of the great perks of working for Automattic is that every 5 years I have the opportunity to take a 2-3 month fully paid time away from my regular work with no expectations beyond disconnecting from work. It […] Keep reading →
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10 tips for a productive and impactful life
A colleague recently gave me a nice compliment. He said, “I recognize you as one of the most productive and impactful people in Automattic.” He followed up with a question, “What is your secret? What advice or tips can you share with someone like me?” The compliment was encouraging – there are some days I…
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Little update to wp.data series
Roughly three years ago I started writing a series of posts on the wp.data API. Little did I know how valuable this post would be to so many people within the WordPress community (and at my current employer Automattic)! Of course, as it is with all APIs, changes happen and while the content of the…
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A tribute to my sister
On the evening of April 5th, 2022, my sister made her journey from this life to the next. My heart is heavy and full of grief. Still. Writing this has been cathartic. I’ve started and stopped many times over the past few months. Often weeping. It’s my attempt to honour her memory and ease the…
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One Year Later, a Reflection on becoming an Automattician
For those who follow me on twitter you may recall a post I tweeted just over a year ago: My start date with Automattic was July 23, 2019. I fully intended on writing a followup to that tweet, but then got sucked into all kinds of fun stuff with my new responsibilities and posted in…
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WordPress Data: Registry
At various places so far in this series, you would have seen me use phrases like: I’ve also mentioned that I’d get to this mysterious “registry” reference later in the series. Well, here we are! What problem does the Registry solve? As a part of diving into what the registry is in the context of…
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WordPress Data Store Properties: Action Creator Generators
Now we have a resolver for asynchronously getting products via a REST api endpoint, we have some action creators, and we have a selector. We haven’t got to the reducer yet, but before we get to it, let’s consider another problem we haven’t addressed yet. When we update or create a product using our ui,…
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What is WordPress Data?
The WordPress data module (or package) is a critical component of the new WordPress Editor as demonstrated by it’s implementation in (at the time of writing) 7 other WordPress packages: @wordpress/block-directory registers a store with the core/block-directory namespace. @wordpress/block-editor registers a store with the core/block-editor namespace. @wordpress/blocks registers a store with the core/blocks namespace. @wordpress/core-data…
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WordPress Data: How to Register a Custom Store
The primary way in which you interact with state in wp.data is through a registered store. In this post we’re going to give an overview of the api for registering a store and then subsequent posts will dive into the specific components of the store config. registerStore( reducerKey, options ) Every data store found in…
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WordPress Data Interlude: Let’s talk Apps
In the last post I gave you a quick overview of the api for registering a new data store. I mentioned that this next post would take a closer look at the individual properties of a store, but before we do that, let’s take a brief break and take a look at an app that…
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WordPress Data Store Properties: Actions
In the previous post of this series, we took a brief interlude to take a look at an app that is using tree state to manage the data the app is using. We discovered that, while the app was functional, some potential problems with using state this way were beginning to surface. In this post,…