Darren Ethier (@nerrad)
I spend a lot of my days in words. Code reviews. Slack threads. 1:1s. Docs. Blog posts like this one. Words are the medium of my work, my relationships, my thoughts. They’re also how I make sense of my own inner world as a husband, a dad, my beliefs, a leader at a company that […]
I’m sitting here writing this post, with a few days left in my 3 month Sabbatical. One of the great perks of working for Automattic is that every 5 years I have the opportunity to take a 2-3 month fully paid time away from my regular work with no expectations beyond disconnecting from work. It […]
One of the things I wanted to do during my sabbatical (more on that later this week) was to create (from scratch) a new block theme for my site. I haven’t done this in a long time and thought it’d be a good way to get familiar with the state of block themes as a […]
A colleague recently gave me a nice compliment. He said, “I recognize you as one of the most productive and impactful people in Automattic.” He followed up with a question, “What is your secret? What advice or tips can you share with someone like me?” The compliment was encouraging – there are some days I […]
Roughly three years ago I started writing a series of posts on the wp.data API. Little did I know how valuable this post would be to so many people within the WordPress community (and at my current employer Automattic)! Of course, as it is with all APIs, changes happen and while the content of the […]
On the evening of April 5th, 2022, my sister made her journey from this life to the next. My heart is heavy and full of grief. Still. Writing this has been cathartic. I’ve started and stopped many times over the past few months. Often weeping. It’s my attempt to honour her memory and ease the […]
With the successful transfer of ownership of Organize Series, and less time to manage my Digital Ocean droplet for my blog, I decided to transfer hosting of unfoldingneurons.com to WordPress.com. Besides removing the need for me to maintain a server, this also allows me to experience the best work my colleagues do and experience all […]
For those who follow me on twitter you may recall a post I tweeted just over a year ago: My start date with Automattic was July 23, 2019. I fully intended on writing a followup to that tweet, but then got sucked into all kinds of fun stuff with my new responsibilities and posted in […]
At various places so far in this series, you would have seen me use phrases like: I’ve also mentioned that I’d get to this mysterious “registry” reference later in the series. Well, here we are! What problem does the Registry solve? As a part of diving into what the registry is in the context of […]
Now we have a resolver for asynchronously getting products via a REST api endpoint, we have some action creators, and we have a selector. We haven’t got to the reducer yet, but before we get to it, let’s consider another problem we haven’t addressed yet. When we update or create a product using our ui, […]