Author: Ryan Sholin

  • What I learned last week

    Oh, I guess that title sounds a little too dramatic, maybe? As if it’s about some big thing that happened? No, I just want to log some of what I’m learning on this break between day jobs. Linked, in. My “professional news” post on LinkedIn from Oct. 4 has done some numbers: 15,000+ views as…

  • What I’m Hearing; How I’m Learning

    Back in the dark ages of Web 2.0, I worked at a startup called Publish2, where we gave bloggers (mostly journalists) tools to curate links and publish them in the sidebar of their blogs. “What I’m Reading” became the easy-to-understand shorthand title for these handy widgets, and this was interesting right up to the point…

  • What’s next

    Last week, I left Automattic and the WordPress VIP team. You can read more about that move on LinkedIn. The reactions, comments, and messages in response to my post have been humbling, as they were internally when I announced my departure. When I write words like “it’s been an honor and a privilege,” I mean…

  • Motorelektrik, an EP

    I released some more music today, an EP of five songs, including three new tracks and two kinda sorta remixes/remasters/reduxes of songs from last year’s Breakage album. There are some more details on Tumblr, but I’ll try to say something different here, just for the exercise. When I released my first album last year, the…

  • Twenty Twenty Four

    This website’s homepage had become a bit of a jumbled mix of unstructured posts and outdated navigation, so I spent about 40 minutes today updating it to the WordPress Twenty Twenty Four theme and doing some minor customization. That post list at the bottom reminds me of Khoi Vinh’s old Subtraction theme, which I used…

  • Breakage, the album

    Sabbatical project? Complete. Listen to Breakage, the album, in its entirety on Bandcamp . Here’s a quick preview: There are some notes about influences and inspirations and references and allusions (and one sample) in the Bandcamp pages for each of the ten original songs. There are some more notes about the process along the way…

  • Jam-uary behind, sabbatical ahead, statement of purpose

    The best thing about working at Automattic is probably all the brilliant people, and the second best thing is easily the before-it-was-cool distributed culture, but a three month paid sabbatical after five years of service is obviously in the top three best things. So here we are — I passed the five-year mark in November,…

  • “I’m working on my family tree” is a perfectly good excuse to swear at your ancestors ten times a day

    One night a few weeks ago, instead of working on the family tree — which I have been doing in my “free” time (ha), rather obsessively, tbqh, for the past, oh, five months or so, judging by the increments of “ryansholin+freetrial5” accounts I am running on various genealogy websites — I tweeted about it. And…

  • Today is the 152nd day of the year 2021

    Seems like a good day for a blog post! One Song Everyday Building (healthy) habits is not something that comes easily to me, so I always find “do this one thing every day of the year” projects appealing. A few years ago I made a “one second everyday” #1se video and surprised my family with…