Read to the end to see a baby penguin who, for some reason, has the energy of a 58-year-old mob boss.
In today’s edition:
- Hello to everyone in Portland posting selfies with folks IRL that they’ve worked/gossiped with on Slack for ages.👋
- Etch, please! Kevin Geary attempts to stir up FOMO with his big, bold launch.
- The Eddie Money parody no one asked for.
Hot Off The Presses: What’s New?
WP Event Organizers Can Now Have a Little Marketing Budget, As a Treat
WordCamp US is underway! If you’re there, have a West Coast IPA at the Upright Brewing taproom for us. Need some tips on getting around? Cami Kaos wrote a great guide.
Speaking of WordPress Events, Global Community Teams Programs Manager Rocio Valdivia recently published a proposal allocating a portion of the WordPress Events/WordCamp budget to marketing and advertising.
The goal? To attract more newcomers to their events – aiming for at least 50% first-time attendees.
WordCamp organizers will get a whopping $50-$400 per event to make that happen.
This is the first time in the 21 year history of WordPress that organizers have been allocated an advertising budget. After WordCamp Netherlands was rescheduled due to low ticket sales, it appears that good ol’ word of mouth isn’t cutting it anymore.
The recommended channels for these funds include event directories, online calendars, newsletter listings, influencer partnerships and even posters, flyers and banners in strategic locations. (Surprised they didn’t mention homemade ‘zines, viral chain emails or just everyone putting the event info in their AOL screen name.)
What about targeted campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn as well as TV, radio and newspaper placements, you might ask? These should only be considered when the prior options have already been explored, because they can “deplete a budget very quickly.”
Of course, the most important part will be getting the targeting right. Any amount of money spent on advertising is always a waste if it isn’t reaching the right people.
Could Etch be a lil bit… Sketch? Only time will tell.
Automatic.css and Frames creator Kevin Geary announced the launch (kinda) of Etch recently, touted as the biggest WP announcement in 20 years.
From what we can gather, it promises to be a unified builder that takes care of page building, CPTs, SEO and all other developer activities, all from one spot without jumping between plugins and different interfaces.
The idea for the project seems to stem from Kevin’s frustration with the “context-switching” required to work in WordPress.
Guess he doesn’t do what the rest of us do – have 4,967 tabs open at once.
But anyway… the catch? Etch doesn’t exist… yet. It’s merely a vision, scheduled to be finished in about three years.
Kevin bypassed the typical funding avenues to take a more grassroots approach, asking the community itself to pay up-front at a minimum buy-in rate of $499 to fund his hypothetical product.
Apparently, Kev said on his live stream (which Mañana No Mas! founder Kurt von Ahnen said evoked memories of Jim Carrey’s Fire Marshall Bill) that those who don’t blindly buy into his vision are a bunch of “negative nancies” and “haters.”
Well… call me Nancy if that’s what you fancy, but is it not unreasonable to want to see more than just a panel of white dudes to prove that your product will actually be something? I dunno… perhaps a visual or a demo or a figma file or an MVP or maybe even a Q&A? Kevin – can ya show us something?!
Sounds like Kevin’s following the “getting the audience to pay you to create the thing” playbook he laid out on this podcast appearance several years ago.
As Lawrence Ladomery points out in his response, it’s a great way to outsource the financial risk of failure. Kev’s drawn a lot of attention by being critical. But at the end of the day, he’s gonna have to back it up with, you know, a real product.
Can Kev and the team make Etch happen? Promising to build something that will replace everything else is a big claim. I guess we’ll just have to wait a few years and find out.
Congrats on Your Funding Round, Patchstack!
Meanwhile Patchstack, a product that actually exists, has secured $5m in a Series A funding round led by Karma Ventures, with additional investment from G+D Ventures and Emilia Capital, the investment firm of Yoast founders Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt.
Patchstack, founded in Estonia, is a cybersecurity startup that saves developers from sleepless nights by helping them quickly identify, prioritize and mitigate new vulnerabilities. Its “virtual patches” instantly deploy protection for your site – kinda like having a Kevin McCallister on your side 24/7 setting up booby-traps for any pesky virtual bandits.
Patchstack recently released their free tool, co-funded by the EU, that helps open-source software vendors comply with the upcoming Cyber Resilience Act. Today, over 5 million websites are scanned with Patchstack and their customers include big names like GoDaddy, Plesk/cPanel and Digital Ocean.
Their uniquely impressive access to vulnerability data is built on a gamified bug bounty program, attracting an army of ethical hackers to hunt down vulnerabilities. (If you fancy yourself a bug hunter, first place on the leaderboard each month gets $2k!)
🎵 We’ve got two tickets to paradise, won’t you communicate in The Hub tonight… 🎵
We’ve got a surprise, especially for you
Something that developers and agencies wanna do
You’ve waited so long, waited so long…
You’ve waited so long, waited so long…
We’re gonna take away those long email chaaains
And a simple ticket system, baby, is all that remains
You’ve waited so long, waited so long…
You’ve waited so long, waited so long…
Mind Bloggling Facts & Stats
- Security best practices recommend plugin auto-updates, but according to the annual WordPress Security survey published by Melapress, only 30% of those who are concerned with plugin or theme-related security issues have auto-updates enabled. Get on it! (Source)
- The Gender Equality in WordPress Business report is out and the results are not looking good, folks. Out of the 200 companies pledged to support Five for the Future, only 4% are led by women. 😯 (Source)
- Some interesting stats on the WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards. For example, WP 6.6 has 38% new developers. (Source)
- WP 6.6.2 is available and includes 15 bug fixes in Core and 11 in the Block Editor. Hurrah! (Source)
Deep Dive: How to Reduce Context Switching as a WordPress Developer
Context switching really is a pain, and it can sap your productivity as a developer. Gloria Mark discovered in her study “The Cost of Interrupted Work” that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on task after mental channel-flipping.
Every time you need to switch between different projects, languages, tools or even various types of tasks such as coding, debugging or client communication, you have to “reload” your brain with all the information about the new task. And according to a Collaboration Study by Livecycle, nearly 50% of developers are struggling with this problem in their current workflows.
So how do you avoid that loss of momentum and keep yourself in a state of deep work? Here are some tips:
- Dedicate meeting-free days, or at least large blocks of time when you’re unavailable. As Paul Graham wrote in his 2009 essay about the Maker’s Schedule, “A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”
- Break a large project into smaller and clearly defined tasks, then do similar tasks together in a batch.
- Use build tools and task runners like Webpack, Gulp and Grunt to automate repetitive tasks so you can focus on the more complex elements of your project.
- Try Docker or Local development environments to isolate WordPress projects, ensuring each has its own environment and configuration, which avoids the need to switch between different server setups.
- The “Do Not Disturb” mode on Slack is your best friend when you’re trying to get some uninterrupted work done. Your team doesn’t need you right this second. They can handle async communication.
- When you DO need to stop working, take a ton of notes for yourself or try interstitial journaling so you can easily hop back onto your train of thought when you return. (Jerry Ng says this is the best thing he’s done for his career.)
Blogs & Resources You Shouldn’t Miss
Josepha Haden Chomphosy gets nostalgic on the WordPress Briefing podcast, as she looks back on her very first WordPress website and everything that’s changed since then. (Trigger warning for a mention of GeoCities that will make some of you feel very old.)
The conversación about translations continues with Matthias Pupillo’s appearance on the WPTavern Podcast. What do you think? Would you trust AI to translate your site?
Listen to Marc Benzakein’s wild story on the WP Builds podcast of a hacker who demanded $40k.
Starting next month, two-factor authentication will be mandatory for all plugin and theme authors, so make sure you’ve got everything configured before then.
The “Pac-Man Rule” is a lovely piece of advice not just for WordCamp events, but for making new friends in any social context.
Coffee Break Distractions
The typing speed of the average person is 40 wpm. See how you compare.
Six Degrees of Wikipedia guides you through the wikihole between any two things you choose.
This site tracks what happens every second on the internet. It’s actually pretty mind boggling.
If you’re quoting a client for a project and they insist on Good, Fast, AND Cheap… send them here.
This sarcastic, pretentious AI judges your music taste and roasts your guilty pleasure listens.
And last but DEFINITELY not least, this absolute UNIT of a baby penguin. Enjoy.
