Less Talk, More Do

I am a design engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, working with the Theme Team to address the design concerns of millions of WordPress users.

• March 12th, 2009

  Want to make some money?

  Can you write Facebook or iPhone Apps? Do you like money? If so, have I got a deal for you: We’re looking for some help building out our iPhone and Facebook applications for Mahalo Answers. If you know of any great developers who have done a really solid application for either platform (or who are [...]

• March 3rd, 2009

  I invented Facebook

  Ok, well not really. But I like to think that I *could* have. The summer after my senior year of high school (that’s 2002), I came up with an idea for a website while delivering pizzas, and I had this exact conversation with my then-girlfriend (now my wife): Me: “Wouldn’t it be cool if there [...]

• December 29th, 2008

  I took 5-Hour Energy, and I feel great!

  For anyone who isn’t in the industry, this is what computer programming really looks like.

• October 12th, 2008

  Sprites and the new Mahalo homepage

  On Friday, we at Mahalo launched a revamped homepage and site-wide redesign, the result of months of technical and editorial development. I’d like to talk specifically about one new technical aspect of the homepage. The old Mahalo homepage had, at any given moment, between 8 and 10 content images. (By “content images,” I’m referring to [...]

• August 21st, 2008

  What was your first program?

  The first computer program I ever wrote was written in GW-BASIC. I was 8 or 9, and my dad had gotten me a book from the library that included the BASIC code for simple text-based games; after typing them into our IBM and playing around with them for a few hours, I decided to use [...]

• April 22nd, 2008

  Finding unused entities in your Firefox extensions

  If you’ve maintained a Firefox extension for any amount of time, you know that you can accumulate unused entities as you change the UI or add/remove features. They just pile up in your .dtd and .properties files, taking up space. Here’s a bash script that will list out any entities or entries in .properties files [...]

• April 14th, 2008

  7 ways to be a better developer

  Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about ways to become a better software developer, specifically in terms of Firefox extension development. I’m listing the ways that I came up with here; most of it can be generalized to the development of any end-user facing program or application, but I wrote it with extension [...]

• April 3rd, 2008

  Firefox development productivity tip

  Since I always use Firefox as a single window with many tabs (and have become quite adept at switching quickly between tabs, but not so fast at switching between windows), having the Error Console open in a separate window always slows me down. What I’ve done is created a bookmark on my toolbar (right-click, select [...]