https://www.flickr.com/photos/restlessglobetrotter/2660204217 Notifications are an essential part of most computer systems. Operations happen asynchronously and users who care about the completion of them need to be notified somehow. In most cases e-mail is the primary way someone is notified. E-mail has been around forever and it's easy to address a message to a specific user or a group of users. Most programming frameworks also include the ability to e-mail. I hate e-mail notifications. Okay; so hate is a powerful word. I severely dislike e-mail notifications. ...

Bicycling is my meditation. I use it as part of my toolset to calm my brain and to train my mind to take in a lot of input and focus on important things. I recently realized that there's a moment that doesn't happen very often when biking. It sometimes takes an entire summer for me to have it occur. I call it the Bicycler's Quiet. Bicycler's Quiet is the sudden loss of wind noise in your ears when you're cycling with the wind. It doesn't happen very often because you need to be cycling at roughly the same speed and direction of the wind. Biking on days with very little to no wind doesn't do it because your movement creates wind across your ears. ...

I turn 37 today. It's been an amazing journey through life so far and I can't wait to see where the next 37+ years lead me. In the past five years alone things have changed so much. I finished my master's degree, we got a place "up north" for the weekends and met so many fun people, I've had amazing jobs doing what I love - software development, and I've had the opportunity to speak at a number of conferences about the things I've done. I've also learned a lot about myself listening to my brain and figuring out this thing called ADD/ADHD. ...

I have always believed I was a procrastinator. I tend to put difficult tasks off until when they are due. I always believed it was the pressure of the deadline that forced me to complete the task. College gave me a series of structured deadlines to learn new things. Procrastination can also add undue stress onto your system. Over time it will make you feel like you're stupid and can't get anything done. ADHD and procrastination seem to go hand in hand as well. ...

I tend to set myself up for defeat with how my brain works when trying to accomplish a task. I overthink things. When I pull a task from my list of things to do a process starts in my head. I visualize the task and then try to figure out what the solution is and how it looks at the end. Smaller tasks with a clear goal seem to start just fine. Tasks that are a bit more nebulous or aren't clear how to do everything end up stalling. I end up wasting time misdirecting myself so I don't have to face the fact that I don't have an immediate solution. ...

Minutes can make a difference. This is something I quickly discovered early on when I started working remote. The granularity of a usable block of time was much bigger when I worked in an office and had a 20 minute commute each way. Unconsciously I believe I felt 15 minutes was the smallest unit of time I could use to create or do something effective. Since I started working remote, I've discovered that unit of time has decreased to something even smaller which is closer to five minutes. ...

petrichor |ˈpeˌtrīkôr| noun a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather. other than the petrichor emanating from the rapidly drying grass, there was not a trace of evidence that it had rained at all.

Manchettes are the paper frills that cover the ends of a rack of ribs in a crown roast. https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/5328798255

Before Working RemoteIn July 2013 I started working remote at Automattic working on the WordPress for iOS app. I was pretty happy with my life at that time and the transition to the new job was not for reasons of disliking my previous job. In fact I loved working for Red Arrow Labs in Milwaukee and it was incredibly hard leaving them. I only left Red Arrow because it felt like Automattic was my unicorn of jobs and I had stumbled upon it by sheer luck. It turns out that I really wasn't entirely happy with how things were going in my life at the time even though the job was great. ...

Watch the drone video below taken at our annual Grand Meetup in Park City, Utah October 2015: https://videopress.com/v/MYKeey35 https://automattic.com/work-with-us/