Story, !rant.

This memory came up as I was commenting on another rant, and thought it was worthy of a better retelling.

So about a year or two ago, I had just gotten a Software Defined Radio, and was tinkering with it and looking around for cool stuff I could do with it. After stalking planes for a while (caught a 747 over my area 😎) I saw this program that decoded satellite images of earth, coming from the NOAA satellites. I thought this was amazing.

So I waited until one was over my area and let the software do its magic. The image was not great, since I had this set up on the first floor and there was a lot of material between me and the satellite.

So I came to the brilliant conclusion that I'd leave the program on automatic more (it will start sampling when the satellite is near) on my terrace, which should yield better results, right?

Perhaps. Who knows. Anyways, couple hours pass and we are running late to a family dinner. So we book it. Family dinner was great, good food and all, and was having fun, so never thought about my poor laptop, sitting alone in the night.

But then, when I was walking home in the rain... It hit me. I started running. I couldn't believe what I had done. Fast forward five minutes, and I'm out of breath, but home. I run upstairs, and see the laptop just sitting there, lid open, no lights on, and of course soaked right through.

I couldn't believe it. My only piece of tech at the time, and my only avenue for programming, gone. And I was 15, so I wasn't getting another one any time soon. Took it inside and drained the water out of it, and just left it there lying on its side.

Next day it worked just fine 🤣 the battery on my laptop only lasted max one hour, so by sheer luck it had lost power before the rain came. That is the one time I have to thank that battery for being such utter trash.

It's surprising how fast current project code becomes ancient archaic code….

Qualifications and experience require to start a WordPress consultancy/brand agency:
• Be a marketing/people person.
• No technical requirements required.

Hate seeing others get clients and delivering half-assed solutions and deploying outdated and even insecure versions of everything.

Coding PHP that prints JS that prints HTML and hating myself and everyone who sets “requirements”.

“Right-click not allowed!” Yeah, right!

When “unexpected end of document” feels really unexpected. 🤔

My current dream project is sailing a 21st Century Message in a Bottle across the Atlantic Ocean from US to Europe, satellite tracking it in apps and desktop environment and more importantly inspiring school children everywhere that anything you can imagine is possible. Fortunately, the project is rapidly becoming a reality - here's how:
- teamed with a few amazing devs virtually
- team created an effective infrastructure for communication and knowledge sharing
- researched oceanic patterns, satellite communications, sensors, material design, recovery logistics...
- developed budget and received funding sign off
- created realistic, yet aggressive project plan with deliverable dates
- built relationships with two Universities for Oceanic knowledge assistance
- developed a partnership with NOAA and will share info

Oh yeah, we did all that and are having fun in only 25 days so far! More challenges to come but we embrace the challenges!

Locating undocumented API endpoints be like …

WordPress core itself isn’t the problem. It’s the horribly substandard plugins the client insist on that introduces all the problems.

Don’t you hate it when you realize that although your latest websites loads fine from your laptop; it takes more than a full second to load it from some location on the other side of the planet?

Setup a VPS from Linode today (they hair started offering 2 GB for 10 USD), and was really pissed when I discovered that their “cloud enhanced” kernel had disabled SELinux and generally removed all sorts of useful features and security features from the default CentOS kernel.

Implementing a third-party link shortner:

link.performance=-400ms; link.privacyFactor=-10;
link.ownership=externalProvider;

Keep hyperlinks in-house. Keep ’em fast. Fight the good fight.

Is WordPress' use of God objects really such a big problem? I mean, sure wp_query is used for every possible purpose and is the most mutated piece of horror every. But what is the harm?

Setting Cache-Control headers that are aware of future changes on a given page is freakishly complex. Too bad the Expires header doesn't overrule Cache-Control.