232 karma · joined August 21, 2012
Otherwise, they may be able to snag your SSH RSA keys off of the hard drive, and if you've password protected it, they can try to brute force it.
Also, it helps safeguard against border patrol wanting to access your data while traveling.
> The winner will pay the amount of the second-highest bid, split either equally or proportionally between the losing applicants
And if you look at the news articles from the time that .blog was auctioned -- like http://domainincite.com/17991-blog-won-in-eight-figure-aucti... -- Minds + Machines, one of the losing bidders, revealed that they had received 3.4 million dollars after pulling out of the bidding for both `.blog` and `.store`
Also, apart from all the above which is public knowledge and there for you to find on your own, I work for Automattic, and when I checked with those who were involved with the .blog purchase, he confirmed that the winning bid was dispersed to the losing bidders. All in all, not a bad consolation prize.
Ehhhh, sometimes `!important` is a good option. I agree that just for the 'quick fix' it's a bad idea, but it can solve other issues beautifully.
For example: If you're writing a plugin or some sort of module that will inject a block of styled content in websites whose normal styling you have no control over, and you need to not accidentally let the sites override your own styling, it's a great fit.
In that situation, it's used to ensure that your block will display correctly across thousands or millions of websites and not fall victim to some awkward accidental local CSS rule like `#body #content #post strong {}` that some developer thought was a clever idea at one point, but didn't realize the implications of the insane level of specificity that is assigned. (I've seen this happen and the support load that it causes).
Far better to have reasonable selectors targeting only your markup, with `!important` so that sites, if they want to, can override your styling, but they just need to be explicit about it.
Long story short, rigidly holding to rules like these in /all/ situations can lead to far worse results for your users than taking them with a grain of salt and making educated decisions while understanding the implications.
Basically, it's an investment both in an open web and in a return on investment over the long term depending on volume of registrations.
So if you had applied to bid, and lost out on .blog, you would have gotten an equal share of the money that Automattic paid to be the owner of the TLD.
Is TinyMCE perfect? Far from it. But it's stable and reliable across browsers, with a well-defined API, and it gets the job done.
I know a lot of folks here would just as soon just use Markdown for all content writing. I like Markdown. Clients hate it. It feels like an obscure language, when they just want something "like Microsoft Word".
And CMS's can hardly say "Yeah, we know we used to support these greater markup sets, but now we're just not going to, so don't open up your old posts, or they're going to lose some content in our bright shiny new editor" -- that's massively problematic as well for user trust.
If you're starting something new, and want to place a hard cap on what your users can do markup-wise, sure, give this a shot. But be very aware of the restrictions that you're imposing.
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/26851
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The Pinking Shears stir from their slumber, awakened by what may seem, to those innocent in the ways of The Shears, a triviality, a nothing-of-consequence. But there are consequences indeed for recklessly trailing your whitespace. Naturally, they a dire!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The Pinking Shears went snicker-snack!
They plucked your tail and with your space
They went sniksnuking back.
Let me tell you, that can be uncomfortable, so always pre-sniksnuk your trailing whites. May The Shears be with you.
That being said, please don't think you need to know PHP to work at Automattic. I mean, it's useful, sure, but JS knowledge is huge as well, and we have some folks on our Data team that just do Python. Our Mobile team works pretty much purely in the languages for Android and iOS. Elasticsearch is something we also do huge amounts of work with (as @gibrown can testify)
If it's interesting to anyone, here's my resume as I submitted it with my application (with personal information redacted) (yes, I wrote it in markdown) -- https://gist.githubusercontent.com/georgestephanis/a5095ca4f...
As a team lead at Automattic, pretty much all of us have regular chats with Matt -- some on bi-weekly group hangouts, others casual private conversations in Slack -- but we all communicate our personnel needs and concerns to him, and sometimes the solution isn't "Hire a new person for X squad" -- it may be take someone looking for a team switch and shift them around internally.
Having actually experienced this in practice, Matt really is stellar at making sure we have the people we need.
Also, while WordPress.com is WordPress some of the way down, some of our other stuff is anything but. We've been migrating to much more API-driven functionality, and the current WordPress.com dashboard (codenamed Calypso) is purely Javascript, based in React, and fully open source. You can download and run it yourself if you like -- https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso
And yes, as noted, Simperium/Simplenote, Cloudup, PollDaddy, Gravatar, others -- these aren't WordPress.
tl;dr: they're normally willing to work with you if there's a problem.
I can say that the trial I did nearly three years ago took me 3 weeks to do, and I put 6h30m in the first week, 8h in the second week, and 6h45m in the third week, for a total of 21h15m.
Also, just to be clear, everyone gets the standard $25/h rate, it doesn't matter if you're a developer from San Francisco or customer support from the Czech Republic. It's something that's easier to standardize, is typically for a short period of time, and has zero correlation to final pay -- which is normally above market rates for wherever you happen to live.
I took a ~4% pay cut when I came aboard at Automattic, which was more than offset by company paid benefits (Health, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance all company paid at 100%, I just took 12 weeks paid paternity leave, 401k matching, work trips and conferences are 100% expense-able, etc), and got more than that raised back on my first year's annual salary review.
Source: I've worked for Automattic since May 2013. It's a great place to be.
Requires Symfony.