Timeline - Jose M Castaneda

Parenthood – The journey begins

Parenthood:

Parenthood is a never-ending journey and every day is a new adventure into making mistakes while trying to keep some sanity. Parenthood has no rules, guidelines or even a reference guide but it is still a great thing to be a part of. I entered upon this journey on June 7, 2012. Okay not entirely but that was the day my little boy, Salvador, was born so I will count that as the actual day the journey began. I will add more and more pages as time goes on and I get time to share these little life lessons.

Parenthood and the rules

Really there have been no rules for either one of us since SJ was born. SJ because his middle name of course begins with a “J” and if you were to look at my little man you would say that is a big name for a little guy. Now I’m just getting a little off track. The things that both of us have learned are things that people often tell us. A good example is when people tell us that we won’t be getting any sleep. I’m used to not sleeping so that is not really new to me. My body has been so REM deprived over the last years that I am more than capable of functioning on three or four hours of sleep a day. The one thing that has changed about that is that the so-called sleep pattern is more random that ever.

Parenthood and the guidelines

Okay the basic guidelines are pretty simple when you get down to it: Don’t kill the baby. That is the basic guideline and the one thing to really follow. Everyday is an exploration into a world of how to. How to keep the little one entertained while keeping your sanity, how to keep him quiet long enough to make a bottle so he won’t scream your ears off. No one thing will work the same way the next day. That is one thing you can count on to be true. There are moments when you will want to be alone to think, read or do something so simple as taking a shower but it can feel like forever because you are changing, feeding, burping and then changing again just to keep your little one from bawling.

What can oftentimes make things easy is having somebody there to help out to accomplish those basic everyday tasks like doing laundry, eating, cooking, cleaning or taking a bath. Unfortunately, I know some people out there don’t often have that luxury and I often wonder about how they manage to do it and have a huge amount of respect for them for being able to pull it off.

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Reading other things

The other day I was trying to understand something and began to search the web. This lead me to a random rabbit hole because isn’t that usually the case with a lot of things too?

The thing I wanted to understand more was MySQL because there are things I know I don’t really know. I want to know more though. I do.

So I went and began to search for a book to read or even a video to help me understand a bit more. I wound up getting a book. I went and got Understanding MySQL Internals. I’ve read the first two chapters so far and am liking it so far. Part of the reason is because it dives more into the code of MySQL. The functions, the classes, and files used.

It really wasn’t what I was expecting but I love that. I guess you can say it almost rekindled my passion for reading those books again. It’s been too long since I’ve read a book like that and it’s been because I just didn’t think much about it.

Honestly, that is the biggest reason I haven’t read much either when it comes to those type of books. The other being that some are just not my type of read. I need to pick up more of those books though. I still haven’t finished reading one from a few years ago. Not sure I will though.

Indecisiveness

The other day I was looking over random themes because I still like web design and still want to mess around with this site for design things. The other thing is because I really can’t just decide how I want this site to look or rather how to display all the posts I have so far.

There are some themes I do like the look up of but I know most just have all sorts of random code that isn’t being used.

It’s a little painful to see that too.

Not fully sure on how to truly react just yet. I think a lot of that is because I haven’t done a theme review in such a long time. I really haven’t. It’s something on my short list of things to dive back to. That and photography.

I have been drawing a bit more too so that’s been good. The other thing I haven’t done though is read an entire book since I keep just putting it off. I don’t really know why I do though. I see the Kindle by my computer but just don’t really read.

I need to find my routine once more. I had one but I think that one didn’t completely involve me writing on here. Might just do that for a bit. I know part of the reason I chose to write on here more was to really use the WordPress editor more. I’ve been using Gutenberg for quite a long time too so I’m fairly comfortable with how things both look and act.

I will say there have been quite a few things that have changed over time with the plugin and how it is merged in with core. I personally have no quarrel with it since for me it’s just this simple site.

By the end of the year I do want to get more projects started at least so I can really see how other things work inside of Gutenberg.

Random post and random thoughts.

Being a guinea pig

The other day I was wanting to experiment with FSE.

Sigh.

Yeah. A bit of a weird term. Acronym really. More to the point another thing that may just confuse a few more people. The reason I say this is because it stands for Full Site Editing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to this. I am. The reason being is that it may help a lot of people in creating their sites to suit their wants. The how is the part I’m kind behind on. I haven’t completely kept up with many of the things being done.

Why now?

The reason I’m posting this now is because some time ago I was reached out to by member of the Theme Team. I haven’t done a theme review in a long time. I mean that too. I haven’t actually looked at theme’s code for things in quite some time. Part of that is because I do have a few other things I was doing. I spent most of my free time just relaxing. It’s something I haven’t really been able to do. The other reason being that I never really set a schedule for outside of work so any free time would be anything.

With that being said, I went and tried to setup something on my local installation. This hurt a little because I opted to not install a lot of things. I wanted quite literally the bare minimum to just get up and running. I installed XAMPP and boom. Got things working in under maybe 30 minutes.

I mean it wasn’t much.

Install Gutenberg
Activate Gutenberg
Enable Full Site Editing

Not much to it. Now the other part that took a bit longer was actually seeing how I could maybe partake in contributing with either docs or code.

Let the fun begin

This part was a little more. More time. Okay, like almost an hour of trying to install one thing to make everything work. Now, you’re probably asking or even wondering, but Jose, why not use something like VVV or Docker to set up your environment?

Again, I wanted the bare minimum to just start. This is where things actually took a bit of a turn. I did already have NodeJS installed so that was sorted. I already had Git because that was one of the other things I installed when I got my Windows machine fully built. The things I needed were:

NodeJS
Git
Python

Yeah. Python.

In all honesty I’m not sure if that was one thing I did the first time I set up my local machine which a very long time ago when I was first starting with WordPress. I might have done it when I wanted to learn random languages I know that much but don’t really recall doing that times after that. It might be because after switching to something other than Windows, Python might have already been installed and running.

Anyway.

The part I that I really wanted to experiment on was following the guide on getting the Full Site Editing experience going. Part of that reason I do still like dabbling with code when I can. At least when it comes to WordPress theming code. Plugins I still just love to look over how they work and break more than anything.

Now, I’ve been doing things like this for some time but it really did feel like something was missing when I was following the steps. It really almost felt like I was out of the loop with how things worked. There were some things I had to actually read in order to understand what was going and how to do it.

The part I am really looking more forward to is being able to use HTML template parts. I think it is that inner part of me that loves the simplicity of it. I love knowing that it does have a low barrier of entry. It is part of that reason I genuinely love WordPress.

That is the biggest reason I love code too.

Always a work in progress

Yesterday I was able to change out the theme to this site. I spent most of the day just fiddling and trying to get things to just work. I took a theme from the free repository and scrapped a lot the unused files.

Yeah.

There were quite a few that I didn’t really need. Many of which were WooCommerce ones. Maybe I’ll get back to that one day but for now, this site will be for just random code things I guess.

The thing I do need to get working is the SCSS compiling because there are a lot of classes that are not really being used. And then getting the JS minification as well. I went the super old school way and just copy-pasted code from one file to another. It was fun getting back to basics. The fun part was actually getting to use a decent header image that I took a long time ago.

Being able to use a photo of my own definitely makes it more fun too. I honestly don’t recall when I took the photo but I do know that I wanted to use it for something.

I’m sure there are more things I probably missed along the way but for now it works and the site is a bit faster too. I do want to improve on that little but that’s going to be for some other time.

🤣

Random spring cleaning

Today I spent some time on the support forums answering some questions and just trying to help some people out.

I also cleaned things up a little bit on this site. The one thing I did was clear out random tables from the database and just tinkered with other things along the way. I was able to fiddle around with a little Drupal as well so that was really nice.

The one thing I liked was looking at metrics. Part of the reason is I like looking at numbers. The first thing I noticed was the size of the overall database. It was just under 7mb which really isn’t much when you think about it. I ran a few commands on them and they sort of helped. A little bit but not like super, crazy, insane good.

One thing I liked doing was running two queries. The first one to get all the posts because I wanted to see how fast it would be and now many there were as well. I ran:

SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'post';
/* Affected rows: 0  Found rows: 166  Warnings: 0  Duration for 1 query: 0.172 sec. (+ 0.312 sec. network) */

I found it pretty cool that I do have 165 posts on here. The other cool part is that it was able to retrieve all of those in well under a second. Now granted that is how many databases are and function as well. Pretty quick when doing those directly.

The one part I was happy about was being able to reduce the size a little because I realized that there were a few tables from plugins I no longer used and some rows that were also removed that I know I won’t be using ever again. Many of those were just widget settings from random themes I had tested on here.

Did I need to do that? Not really. It was mostly because I wanted to practice things. It really has been way too long since I’ve even done anything like that. I’ve been enjoying that since that’s what I spent most of my day on.

The other thing was tinkering with JavaScript and some JSON responses. I was having some fun with the WordPress api and just getting some things to actually render properly on the page. Not using any external libraries as well so that was pretty fun to do.

I have a post right now in draft that actually does go a bit more into frameworks too. Or at least the ones I’ve read some documents of and have tried. This is the part where I just say if there were more hours in the day I would be able to explore all of them.

Hopefully I can look over more things next week.

Darn command line

I don’t remember when I did this but I did find it a little funny. I wanted to install SVN on my Windows machine because I clearly like to torture myself. Right?

Okay, but really.

I wanted to install it because WordPress is still using it for now. I do think it is a good tool to learn first when getting started with version control. Or really any version control system for that matter before jumping into Git. That’s me saying that.

Anyway. As I was glossing over the pages I had to try and recall what I had done the first time I had even done that. I had to think back to 2011. Yeah. That long ago when I actually tried to do that. At least I think it was. Might have been a little later but around that time.

I couldn’t recall what I had used to I did the super trusty method. I overflowed that stack and then recalled that I used TortoiseSVN.

Sweet!!

Super easy and not hard to install. I ran the thing and boom went that dynamite. I had SVN installed on my computer. I opened up my Git bash instance and tried to checkout the trunk repo and was met with failure. The command wasn’t recognized.

I swear, I had done it right.

I look up the path settings. It wasn’t there. So I try to add.

Nothing. Still fails.

I restart the computer because you know support and resetting things.

Nope.

Okay. Now what?

Had I actually missed something?

🤔

I clicked the installer again and began to read all the screens. Yes. All of them.

And yep. I had missed something.

I forgot to click the add command line checkbox.

Sigh.

Let me repeat that. I read all the screens.

Yeah, even I will sometimes forget to actually check the things.

Oh well. The good news is that SVN is running fine and I can break my machine even more with

Extra or missing characters

The other day I was tinkering with a random test site and was driven to near madness. Why? I kept forgetting to add the ending semicolon. Every single time. It wasn’t that I would miss the key stroke it was that I just legit didn’t press the thing.

I spent a minute or two every time I would press enter to try and run what I was doing and it would give me a new line. Nothing would happen and I would just stare at the command line. Like, what did I just do? Why isn’t it returning what I know should be returned? Why was I forgetting the simple thing to enter the semicolon at the end of my statement? You’d think after the first 10 times I would have realized, right?

No.

I still did it an hour later and that’s when I realized that I really wasn’t pressing the button. That damned key. My finger just didn’t want to press it. It was afraid of it. It ran from it.

Okay, but really it was because I forgot what I was actually doing and where it was begin done on. I was futzing around with random MySQL queries on the command line and I would forget the ending semicolon.

Yeah. I really did get so used to using a GUI tool that I nearly forgot the syntax. This is now me sighing. This is now me laughing because it really was a simple a mistake that can easily be missed and forgotten. Now, granted it took me 2 hours to retrain my brain to do that but that’s 2 hours of muscle memory that will be super useful down the line.

Editing and creating

I have been using Gutenberg since it was announced. I haven’t honestly typed a lot with it in the last year unfortunately. Again, it has boiled down to time. I haven’t put that time aside to create posts here.

I just haven’t.

I do need to change that and I hope I can pretty soon too. There are so many things I do want to learn along the way. I think the biggest challenge may just very well be in the how.

I have slowly shifted in doing WordPress related things a little and I do feel good about that. It may sound a little strange for some but it is very true. When I began working at Pantheon, I knew there would be a lot of things I would need to learn. Drupal being one. Now, I want to say this because this is exactly how I feel, I like both of them.

They each have their positive and negatives. Each is a tool that can be used and just like any tool it does take time to master it. I am by no means a grand master on either one but I do want to get more familiar and comfortable with each one.

When I created this site it really was to tinker with WordPress and get comfortable with code. I added the tagline, “Life. Code. WordPress,” because that was what I would write about. Life being the first, code second, and WordPress last. Over the years I did a lot of code and WordPress posting and from time to time life events. As much as I would love to be able to have a post every week I just can’t do it. At least not yet.

Hopefully in a few weeks I can share some news and more information as well. For now, I’ll keep drafting things and just publishing when I can.

Too many ideas

Here is the deal, I’ve been reviewing themes for quite some time and I really haven’t made one for myself. I’ve made a child theme for this site but that’s about it. It’s nothing super fancy but I know that I could do more.

The biggest reason at the moment is that I really haven’t been visually inspired.

I have been sidetracked. Not going to lie about it.

There have been other things that I’ve prioritized as well. I will say though when I do finally get enough time I will be grinding away on that side. It really has been great just exploring other things in the mean time.

I think that part of it is also that I haven’t really used this site as much as well. That part has just been sort of neglected for too long. I would love to be able to post more things but I’ve hit a mental block it feels like.

It also has been way too long since I looked at core code to see how things have changed. I may need to do that one of these days to get a better clue on what I really want to be doing as well. I know I have some posts that go over some functions, some hooks, but what I really want to be doing is perhaps a little more than just that.

Themes and plugins are and always will be super interesting to me. I think a lot of it is also that I haven’t really had puzzles I personally want to solve. I need to get on those forums more often and just dig more.

Sigh.

All in time, I guess.

Extended learning

I’m really bad at updating this site. I know. A lot of it being I just haven’t been able to really jot things down here.

Over the years I’ve posted several things. Many were to keep track of things I learned. There were some that were possibly random. Again, I learned from that. As this year start to come to an “end” I think about this site and the content I want to be posting.

For me, this site was a test. To get more and more familiar with WordPress and how things worked with code. I’ve learned quite a lot too along the way. The biggest one being how themes are loaded and function. There is a lot of magic that goes on. It’s super crazy and cool to see the code that runs so many sites on this crazy place we call the web.

I was also able to meet a lot of super amazingly talented people along the way. There are still a lot of people I will meet and I do look forward to meeting all of them too.

I keep getting a bit sidetracked on this too.

As the years went by, I wanted to keep learning new things. I looked at random online course that I could take on. Yes, there are quite a few out there some are really good. Some are just okay in that I would just copy the code, make a small edit, paste and not really learn much from it. Other than keyboard shortcuts are super nice for things like that.

The other day I was looking over some of the places I had enrolled in or rather had my name attached to. 3 sites that I found in my password manager. I’m sure there are a few I may have missed but still those were just free resources.

The real test now will be enrolling in courses simultaneously for an actual degree. Yes, I started the process and will be actually going for one shortly. This will be good. I know it will take a lot of effort and a lot of time but it will be amazing once it is all said and done.

So if you don’t hear from me that’s probably why.

I do want to keep posting here about WordPress things I do find and come across as well it just will be a bit longer now.