Ryan Sholin

Category: Ideas

  • Frequently Asked Questions about Enterprise WordPress

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    Ryan Sholin
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    One interesting thing about leaving a job and looking for a new job and reconnecting with old colleagues from other companies and talking to new people when networking is that you end up talking about the job you just left quite a bit to explain what you’ve been doing for the past seven years. I’m…

  • What I learned last week

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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…

  • 15 reasons I’m working on sustainability

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

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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

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    Ryan Sholin
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    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…