Lessons from MTPEngage Manchester 2019

(N.B. These are notes from my thoughts while people were talking as much as they are notes about what was actually said; I hope I’ve not misrepresented anyone though, and please call me out if I have.) Nilan Peiris from Transferwise talked about Customer Led Growth, he mentors his teams to constantly remember the problem …

Example composer.json for SVN repos with no structure and no composer.json

Today I needed to include some WordPress.com themes from the official SVN repository, using Composer. This repository uses SVN and has not got the usual trunk, branches, etc directories that Composer expects, which makes it tricky. It’s possible though, and thanks to colleague Tom Nowell, I eventually got there. Here’s that example code:

Podcast – How Google uses behavioral science to make work suck less

Podcast: How Google uses behavioral science to make work suck less This episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast came recommended by Donncha, a colleague at Automattic. It’s packed full of really interesting thoughts, including “the job of a manager is to serve their team”; a good reminder that everything we at WordPress.com VIP do in …

Displaying MySQL query results vertically

Ever found the MySQL table view annoying? The table format is terrible at displaying rows with long values, isn’t it? You can get MySQL to display results vertically: Some query results are much more readable when displayed vertically, instead of in the usual horizontal table format. Queries can be displayed vertically by terminating the query …

Protecting staging sites with Basic Authentication

This approach was primarily devised for use with WP Engine staging sites, but will work in any situation where you have no access to Apache’s config and need to use a single .htaccess file for multiple domains (e.g. a multisite setup). We’ve recently had a couple of projects hosted on WPEngine where we need to …