The Negative You Can't Prove
Anthropic reports a perfect zero on the agentic misalignment eval. Going from 96% to zero is real progress, but zero is a strange number to land on — and behavioral testing has a structural limit no methodology fixes.
Aaron Holbrook
How we see shapes our reality. Aaron Holbrook's home on the internet: writing, music, photographs, and what's past the frame.
Latest posts
Programmatically clear your WP Engine cache
In my desire to create a better process for building and deploying at Zeek, I recently hit a road bump while trying to perform automatic visual regression testing immediately after deployment.
Simpler loading with Autoload!
Automatically load all PHP files in the specified directory. Recursively.
New plugin: Seeder
It's nice to pre-populate terms, content or have the ability to only OCCASIONALLY run actions.
Fail Early, Fail Often
Make your code simpler to read and simpler to debug by breaking apart your conditional statements and exiting the function whenever possible.
Developing With Composer
Did you know you can not only use Composer to manage dependencies, but actually develop a package alongside your dependencies?
Git Subtrees - A Primer
Difficult to modularize code and maintain separate repos. Submodules are difficult or problematic to use.
Testing a Transient Locking Mechanism with Siege
When working with caching strategies, it's important to step through your invalidation strategies. Namely, thinking through at what point does the data that you're caching get regenerated, how does it get regenerated and who is regenerating it.
WordPress Permissions Update Error [RESOLVED]
Recently I ran into an issue where an installation of WordPress that had never had any issues updating stopped being able to update via the admin update button.
Git Bisect
One of the lowest hanging fruits to learn is how to fix code regressions quickly and easily with `git bisect`
HTTP Error on Image Upload [RESOLVED]
This was a fun little issue to come across
WordPress Template Hierarchy Explained
I did a quick screencast on what the WordPress Template Hierarchy is and why understanding it is one of the first steps to becoming a good WordPress developer.
My solution to quickly syncing .bash_profile on multiple machines
You know that feeling when you're setting up a brand new server and it's not set up the way you've spent years tweaking it to be?
Full listing of all WordPress functions
Because I'm a huge nerd and my google search results failed to bring up anything resembling a true listing, I thought I would throw together a little curl, grep and sed magic.
Debugging server problems step by step
I had recently moved a customized WooCommerce site from MediaTemple GS
Screencast: Intro to Git
Thought it'd be nice to demo how to set up and get your own repository going with Git.
My thoughts on WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012
Some thoughts I had on my way home from WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012:
Grand Rapids slides!
Here are my slides from my talk on WordPress and Version Control from WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012 August 18th.
Demystifying the black box that is objects and arrays
Something I hear all the time and that was initially the biggest learning for me was understanding the data and the structure of objects that we have to interact with.
Incremental Array Changes
Something that I've come across recently as I start to build dynamic queries is changing the arguments array ever so slightly.
Good weekend
Today was a good day. In fact, this weekend was a good weekend.
WordCamp Milwaukee 2012, slides!
Thanks to everyone who attended my session on WordPress and Version Control!
WordCamp Chicago 2011
So I just got back home from the first day of Chicago's WordCamp 2011 held at the lovely Depaul University in downtown Chicago. Man, what a great experience - I just love the inspiration and the idea sharing that goes on at these conferences.
Adding a redirect link from a post (or page)
I just had a client request that for his home page posts that were being displayed, have them link instead to a permanent page. The type of content that they were linking to was longer term and the posts that were being displayed were created just as excerpts.
Auto-update version of css
Anytime you update the css file any browser will think it's a new file and go and get it.
It's about time
If you have to use Internet Explorer, at least make sure you're using the newest one.
get_template_part and Custom Templates
In building the Centegra physician directory back in WordPress 3.0, there was no real way to use WordPress to display out a listing or archive of your custom posts.
My Web Design Workflow
I develop primarily on two mac computers, synced via DropBox. For local development I use MAMP.
Displaying a custom header based on URL
So I recently ran across a situation on Centegra's website where I had set up our header image to show an image based on the section or area it's in.