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I love the word "stabby". It typically means, if you're feeling stabby, that you would like to stab someone or something because of your current emotional state. Stabby can also describe the state of a thing - like "pairing bluetooth headsets is stabby" because it's a pain in the ass. I've tried to pass around the Theory of Stabby to my coworkers at previous jobs and at Automattic. It's definitely been a successful campaign because we managed to get a stabby emoticon added to our chat system, Slack. ...

It's definitely not any surprise to me that Tim Cook is gay. When he became CEO of Apple and after Steve Jobs' death it was talked about. I was surprised for a brief moment upon that initial discovery but was happy to see Apple embracing diversity at all levels. Today Tim Cook came out publicly as gay in hopes to inspire others to be themselves and accept others too. What I'm really surprised and delighted to see are the reactions from other developers in the Apple/Mac/iOS community: ...

WordPress.com's Daily Post is holding an online photo blogging course called Photo 101. It starts Monday, November 3rd and it goes through November 28th. Each day a topic is presented and it's your challenge to post a photo that is your interpretation of the topic. Along with the topic are tips and tricks for you to learn. Posts are tagged so they're visible on the WordPress.com Reader. WordPress.com-hosted sites and self-hosted sites are both encouraged to join in! ...

I thought I knew a lot about Core Data with having used it a lot over the past years. Today, I learned something new that I feel like I should have known for a long time. NSManagedObjectIDs can change. Seriously. If you want a different notion of identity, you can just add an UUID string as an attribute to your entity. A separate mapping table is not recommend. The 2 apps should agree to use the same UUIDs for the same identities.BenRef: https://devforums.apple.com/message/480640#480640 ...

UPS is delivering my iPhone 6 Plus today.

Plus using dependency managers like CocoaPods tends to get unwieldily the larger your team gets. Not only do you have to worry about the libraries as dependencies but now you have to worry about the versioning of the dependency manager. Oy!

At Automattic we all are a distributed workforce - we all work from all over the world. Every few months we meet up with our teammates and work on projects designed to be started and finished within the week. Once a year the entire company gets together in one place and we affectionally dub it the "Grand Meetup" (abbreviated GM). This year, we all met up in Park City, Utah USA at the Grand Summit Canyons Resort. ...

I've been noticing on my Mac OS X Mavericks 10.8 Server I have running in a data center has been filling up its Time Machine volume way too quickly. The backups are continually huge and only about a week fits on the second hard drive inside of the Mac mini. Every time the machine backed up it was taking up so much room that previous backups had to be deleted. ...

I've noticed a trend lately - I never shut down my MacBook Pro(s) any more. Ever since Power Nap came out I tend to just leave my machines running all the time, even if they're on battery. Even with boot times being so fast on the SSD retina MBP I just like the fact I can leave everything be.

The WordPress for iOS project had a number of unit tests using Core Data and a custom asynchronous test helper. The helper used a semaphore in a global scope and a bit of method swizzling to give a wait/notify mechanism. The problem with this solution was the global semaphore and poorly written tests causing a conflict. Tests would call the ending wait and previous tests running Core Data would fire off notifies causing a mismatch between the original test and the recipient of the message to pass by the current semaphore. ...