Author: Jason Cosper
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Foreclosing on the future of the book
Getting wild with digital design in 2018 means getting wild in 2018 with responsive design that’s agnostic to the kind of device you’re rocking. That’s doable, probably, but it’s really, really hard. Tim Carmody, Foreclosing on the future of the book
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Don’t be evil
The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object. It’s like the famous line from the Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they…
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Goodbye 2017
Hey, 2017. You were, hands down, the worst year of my life. The more distance that I’m able to put between you and I, the better. Now, don’t get me wrong. Some really great things happened this year. But the worst thing I’ve ever been through in my life — which I’d much rather be…
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My year of less
I’ve decided that 2018 is going to be a year of paring back. Less junk. Less apps. Less podcasts. Less distractions. Less commitments. Less eating out. Less bullshit. Less stress. I’m not really interested in obsessively measuring how successful I am at doing any of these things. Mainly because of the “less stress” item on…
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Rotonde
Because all of the other social networks have become a huge fucking bummer, I’ve been lurking on a new peer-to-peer social network, Rotonde. Right now, the chatter over there is (mainly) a bunch of navel gazing around building Rotonde. But I kind of prefer people yapping about hacking on JavaScript to a shitload of emotionally…
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Finishing touch
I wish that Alex Norris would quit writing about my life.
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On fresh starts
There is no need to sharpen my pencils anymore. My pencils are sharp enough. Even the dull ones will make a mark. — Ze Frank, “An Invocation for Beginnings“ Now’s as good a time as any for starting over, right? So let’s do something new. Something without all of the cruft. Something that doesn’t feel like an…
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The Decision
I know things are normally pretty quiet around here. But I have some actual, legitimate news. In just a couple weeks, I’ll be joining the Managed WordPress team at Liquid Web as their Senior Performance Engineer. It’s an opportunity for me to get out of Marketing—where I’ve been broadening my skillset since last fall—and back…
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A Quick Take On Guetzli
I ran a few (incredibly unscientific) tests on Google’s new Guetzli JPEG encoder last night at 100%, 90%, and 84% compression. Why 84%? Well, that’s the lowest the Guetzli binary will let you go without editing the source and recompiling. Each run (compressing a single image) took about 20 minutes on a medium sized cloud instance…
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Return of the Slack
While I find the official WordPress Slack team incredibly useful, the sheer scope of it — over 10,000 users & 66 channels — makes the copy of Slack on my desktop ridiculously sluggish. It’s actually pretty crazy how much lower the RAM usage on my machine is when I remove the WordPress team from the app. At this…
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Playing with Laravel Valet
I finally had the chance to do a little WordPress work in Laravel’s lightweight development environment Valet last week. My hot take? If you’re interested in setting it up on your Mac, there’s a solid tutorial that outlines how to get started by Tom McFarlin over at Tuts+. And if you’d like to go down the rabbit hole even further,…
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Simple Cache
Taylor has been on fucking fire lately with plugin releases. Simple Cache does one thing — caching, natch — and it does it very well: Simple Cache was constructed after getting frustrated with the major caching plugins available and building sites with developer-only complex caching solutions that get millions of page views per day. If…
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DuoTone Themes for Atom
While I’m normally a Solarized Dark guy — seriously, I’ve Solarized Dark’d all the things on pretty much every computer I touch — these Atom syntax themes are really pleasant. I’ve been looking to change things up lately, so I’m going to try living with darkSea for the next month. I’ll let y’all know how it goes!
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Mindfulness is Hard
Ever since I listened to this episode of The Tim Ferriss Show in December, I’ve been thinking about trying to see if I can manage to go 21 days without complaining to help improve my mindfulness. The plan is a fairly simple one: Put on one of those silicone (or rubber) bracelets. Come up with a list…
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Podcasting Preflight
After guesting on a few podcasts over the past year, I’ve come up with what I feel is a simple (but thorough) preflight checklist of the things that I like to do to before recording. These things help normalize my environment and minimize the majority of technical difficulties that I run into. Anyway… In an attempt…
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Reasons for Custom Tables and an API
When it comes to storing large amounts of data that does not very closely mimic existing WordPress database schemas, you should absolutely use custom tables. Choosing not to use a custom table will likely cause more harm than good. While it’s possible to store almost anything you want as a custom post type in the wp_posts…
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Gotta Podcatch ‘Em All
A couple great WordPress podcasts — WP Dev Table and WPwatercooler — have been nice enough to have me on as a guest recently. Instead of having you dig around each site to find the episodes, I’ll just go ahead and leave them here… As you can see, I’m a pretty insightful guy. Humble too. Want to have me…
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The Big List of Naughty Strings
The Big List of Naughty Strings is an evolving list of strings which have a high probability of causing issues when used as user-input data. This is intended for use in helping both automated and manual QA testing; useful for whenever your QA engineer walks into a bar.
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What to Expect When Expecting Content Security Policy Reports
Zach Tollman goes deep on Content Security Policy reporting in browsers.
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Shortcake Bakery
Shortcake + Shortcake Bakery = Easy PDF, JavaScript, iFrame, Facebook post, Scribd & Genius embeds from the team at Fusion. There’s also a really nice image comparison tool. If you’re into that sort of thing. Which I am.