Today, I turn 7 years at Automattic. Overall, 2023 was a great year: Working at Automattic allowed me to travel with my family and work from different locations. We traveled to all neighboring countries (Greece, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Albania, Serbia), and also France, Turkey, and Spain. Managed to ship tons of projects; a big one was where we structured and held a Security Workshop for over 40 teams (~250 engineers). Got deeper into philosophy and psychology, and kept blogging/sharing my learnings. This helped me improve my role as a DevEx engineer. Earned my WordCamp Speaker badge at WordCamp Sk ..read more

I recently read this book. This is a book by Confucius’ students – he himself never did any writings. There are many translations of the books, and while none of them are perfect, I found these quotes to be my favorite ones. [01-01] Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters? Is he not a man of complete virtue, who feels no discomposure though men may take no note of him? [01-08] If the scholar be not grave, he will not call forth any veneration, and his learning will not be solid. Hold faithfulnes ..read more

I’ve bought this book some time ago and only recently spent time reading it. Overall it is a good book – reading it made me think of my habits and also the habits of my close ones. Read more: Power of Habit overview When a habit occurs, the brain stops participating in making decisions – unless we actively fight against a habit (find other routines), this model will happen automatically. Habits are the brain’s way to save energy. A habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD. The Habit loop: 1) signal/cue – activator tha ..read more

Recently I spent some time reading this book that a coworker suggested. My overall feeling is that it’s a good book. The first 40% of pages can be triggering (makes some strong statements), but then some of those are rejected later, as expected in a philosophy book My take is that I think this book should be literally read in a group. The best outcome of it was just discussing it with my coworkers or ranting about it (find <rant> in this post). 1. Intro Caveat, no single solution, will talk from experiences 2. Complexity Complexity is anything related to the structure of a so ..read more

I recently played my first Daily Chess game with one of my friends on Chess.com, and I noticed that Daily Chess is a perfect format for improving one’s chess skills. It basically gives you 24 hours to make a move. I loved the concept of conditional moves, which allow you to define a few “if-then”s depending on the opponent’s path. All this gives you much time to do analysis without the time pressure. The most important bit is that you make a move when you feel in the mood, and each move you make can be treated like its own puzzle – this allows you to maximize your performance where for example ..read more

Inspired by Python’s functools.partial, I wanted to bring partial function application into PHP. This is already supported by Haskell, and other languages as well. It is similar to the concept of Currying. Partial function applications are a very powerful concept, and as such, it provides a new way to build abstractions. Recently, I decided to spend some time working with the Zend API. In this blogpost, I will document my journey. Userland (PHP) The easiest way is to start in the userland. I wrote the function cufp – short for call_user_func_partial, following the notation of call_user_func ..read more

As I reflect on my pattern of thoughts lately, I noticed how I often “step out” and think of things at a higher level, e.g., trying to justify some justifications, etc. Where does this change come from? I’d assume it has to do with me reading a lot of philosophy lately I’ll post some brief random thoughts here about this matter. I did a lot of reading lately, and I can’t say that I remember everything on top of my mind, but there is still influence even in such passive learning. For example, I encountered Knowledge=JTB twice so far, and the second time I feel like I really grasped it, compare ..read more

Recently I wrapped Yale’s Introduction to Psychology course at Coursera. I will post my notes/overview here. The certificate can be downloaded here. Foundations Psychology relies on materialism. While the neural networks model explains a lot of stuff, the “hard problem of consciousness” (feelings, emergent properties, etc.) is still tricky. Freud explored how desires and motivations affect our actions unconsciously. He divided the mind into id (basic desires), ego (balancing desires with reality), and super-ego (internalized moral rules). Freud suggested we have hidden, unacceptable thoughts m ..read more

I bought this book recently and went through it in a single weekend. It reads very easily. The book is a dialogue between a philosopher and a young person; naturally, in the beginning, the young person is very skeptical about what the philosopher has to say. They discuss philosophical and psychological concepts in five days, and each day is a separate chapter, whereas each chapter is 40 pages on average. The authors are mainly inspired by the psychologist Alfred Adler and use many of his concepts/ideas, but they also find inspiration in Socrates, Platon, Aristotle. Adler’s main idea is to put ..read more

ABOUT AUTOMATTIC Founded in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg, the co-creator of WordPress software, Automattic has been recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies. We’re the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Simplenote, Longreads, WPScan, Akismet, Gravatar, Crowdsignal, Cloudup, Tumblr, Day One, Pocket Casts, WordPress VIP, and more. As of today, there are 1,957 Automatticians in 95 countries speaking 121 different languages. Maybe you can be one of us ..read more