egill.blog

My work has had me focused on making websites more responsive. Part of taking a non-responsive design and back-porting some media queries into the CSS is identifying where the breakpoints for a particular design exist.

To aid in identifying where these breakpoints are I built a page with an iframe in it that would tell me how wide it is at any given time. More features were added and eventually we had a useful little tool. So here it is for your pleasure, the elegantly named:

HTTP://ICANHAZ.RESPONSIV.ES/

One particularly useful features is the bookmarklet. Drag that thing to your browser’s bookmark bar and then click it when you want to load up whatever page you happen to be looking at.

If you’d like to check out the source code it’s on Github. It’s mostly client side Javascript but with a little Node.js and CoffeeScript to help determine the X-FRAME-OPTIONS

Michelle and I did our 5+k a day or two early, and all we got were these geocaches.

To complete the 30 YEARS OF PACMAN and The Smiley Series geocaching “geoart” series, we:

• Walked 14 miles in the desert,
• Found 57 geocaches,
• Suffered 95°F heat, and
• Drank one metric ton of water.

Back in 2010 we introduced the exciting new ability to Like the individual posts you’ve read all around WordPress.com. It’s been one of our most popular features since then, as evidenced by the chart below that goes up-and-to-the-right as an indication of great success and achievement.

Today I’m happy to announce a few enhancements to the way Likes work that we think you’ll really like. 🙂

Show Likes on Pages

In the past, we’ve always restricted Likes to individual blog posts. Given the success of Likes, we want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to Like what they are reading, wherever they are reading it. Likes now share the same display settings as your sharing buttons (which you can change from Settings -> Sharing in your dashboard). In addition to showing Likes on single posts, you can now show Likes on all of your site’s content:

Here’s…

Lots of coverage today on some excellent new hires that we just announced (General Counsel & CFO) and some revenue numbers that we shared.

Our very own Matt Mullenweg puts it well:

Liz Gannes writes for AllThingsD, Automattic Grows Up: The Company Behind WordPress.com Shares Revenue Numbers and Hires Execs. In addition to Stu joining as CFO and Paul as Consigliere/Automattlock, we’ve been on a hiring roll the past month or two with excellent folks joining at every level of the company, including two more Matts. If you’re passionate about Open Source and making the web a better place, like we are, there’s never been a better time to join. My favorite thing about logging in every morning is the people I work with. Friends say I work too much but it hardly feels like work at all. Update: Now in Techcrunch too

via http://ma.tt/2012/04/automattic-growth/

Update: Please submit your links by EOD on April 23, 2012. Note that your submission will remain private, but we are receiving them.

Our company Automattic — which runs WordPress.com, Akismet, VaultPress, and many other services — is looking for a few stellar summer student interns, specifically to work with us on the VIP team. The internship runs from June 1st through August 31st of 2012, but we are flexible on the dates.

As a paid intern, you’ll be working on a range of projects depending on your skills & passions — everything from writing case studies to doing development work on plugins that improve WordPress functionality for large media companies.

Where will you be working you may ask ? Anywhere ! We are a distributed company and are happy if you work from wherever you are — including your parent’s summer beach house — as long as…

Several times in the last several weeks, I’ve found myself involved in an internet dust-up on twitter about “women in tech”. This is the politically correct term. But what it’s really about is the rampant misogyny and sexism in the tech industry. The most recent kerfuffle involved geekli.st. I won’t go over the details. Start at this article and then the internets will give you all the information you can stand. The short of it is that there’s a video promoting the Geeklist brand that made some women uncomfortable. And when one spoke up, she was systematically dismissed, marginalized and threatened, rather than having her issues taken seriously.

Over the course of this internet argument, I had several well-meaning and curious guys reach out to me to try and understand what all the fuss was about. They seemed like good people, but they were missing something about what it means…

A modern HTTP server running on somewhat recent hardware is capable of servicing a huge number of requests with very low latency. Here’s a plot showing requests per second vs. number of concurrent connections for the default index.html page included with nginx 1.0.14.

With this particular hardware & software combination the server quickly reaches over 500,000 requests/sec and sustains that with gradually increasing latency. Even at 1,000 concurrent connections, each requesting the page as quickly as possible, latency is only around 1.5ms.

The plot shows the average requests/sec and per-request latency of 3 runs of wrk -t 10 -c N -r 10m http://localhost:8080/index.html where N = number of connections. The load generator is wrk, a scalable HTTP benchmarking tool.