A couple of weeks ago, I kicked off my first sabbatical since starting at Automattic a little over five years ago.

The first fortnight of my sabbatical has consisted of:

Three Rings CIC's AGM weekend and lots of planning for the future of the organisation and how we make it a better

automattic, volunteering, sabbatical, three rings, work, theme park, job, travel, barcelona, castles, spain

I've spent the last week in Tulum, on Mexico's beautiful Yucatan Peninsula, for an Automattic meetup. And as usual for these kinds of work gatherings, it was magical (and, after many recent departures, a welcome opportunity to feel a closer connection to those of us that remain).

Only after automattic, cocktails, work, travel, memorable, magic, party, swimming

From safely outside of its predicted path, just around the Yucatan coast, Hurricane Milton seems like a forboding and distant monster. A growing threat whose path will thankfully take it away, not towards, me.

My heart goes out to the people on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico who find

automattic, work, video, travel, memorable, hurricane, weather, disaster

Power's out yet again at my house (though not for the last reason nor because of our weird wiring: this time it's for tree trimming), so here I am in my favourite coworking-friendly local cafe with The Signal And The Noise (which I've talked about before) in my ears and a whole lot of sprint automattic, music, telecommuting, work, pagan wanderer lu, teleworking

...in England and Wales
From 1696 until 1851 a "window tax" was imposed in England and Wales. Sort-of a precursor to property taxes like council tax today, it used an estimate of the value of a property as an indicator of the wealth of its occupants: counting the number of windows provided the tax, automattic, capitalism, history, politics, canal, work, boats, travel, windows, laws, published on gemini, netherlands

I continue to be sceptical of AI's ability to solve 90%+ of the problems that people are trying to solve with it.

But damn, if you're feeling uninspired as you're getting ready to start work on a Monday morning, try dumping your to-do list into a songwriting AI like Suno and ask it to write an ai, music, work, inspiration

I'm in Amsterdam for a meetup for my new team at Automattic.

When we've not been out tackling escape rooms, finding geocaches, and eating curry, we've been doing a variety of activities to help solidify our new team's goals, priorities, and expertise: y'know, the normal things you might automattic, networking, games, work, travel, escape rooms, game, netherlands

Earlier this year, I changed team at work.

When I started at Automattic in 2019 I was assigned to Team Alpha, the engineering team responsible for WooCommerce.com. In 2020 the team later forked into teams Fire and Fuel, and I landed on the Fire side of the split.

This winter, though,

automattic, work, graphs

In August, I celebrated my blog - with its homepage weighing-in at a total of just 481kb - being admitted to Kev Quirk‘s 512kb club. 512kb club celebrates websites (often personal sites) whose homepage are neither "ultra minimal" or "link pages" but have a total size, including all assets, of u automattic, web development, web, work, performance, blogging, smolweb

Yesterday, I wrote the stupidest bit of CSS of my entire career.

Owners of online shops powered by WooCommerce can optionally "connect" their stores back to Woo.com. This enables them to manage their subscriptions to any extensions they use to enhance their store. They can also browse a automattic, woocommerce, web development, code, work, stupidity, css, programming, web design