Notices by Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧 (alda@topspicy.social)

As the lady who comes in and sweeps the floors after a WordPress plugin vulnerability has destroyed your company website and online shop and the members of an Indonesian crime syndicate now have all your customers' purchase histories — Instead of licenses for paid plugins simply expiring after 6 months, I've been seeing far more revenue generating sites with "nulled" premium plugins installed.

And that is really, really bad and extremely unprofessional.

#WordPress #Infosec

Want to hear the truth about #Automattic, the not-like-the-other-girls company that still thinks it is a startup after 20 years and his founder acts like he invented remote working?

With the CEO who boast about his access to an international talent pool?

And the slogan "embrace the chaos" greeting you in all caps when you open the staff handbook?

Read on.

@chris Is it lit?

Anyway. Monoculture is bad. Diversify your skills. Your preferred CMS or tech stack is not a belief system. Perhaps a single deranged former wunderkind should not be the single point of failure of the way you make a living.

@navi I think what matters here is that whatever your work is about, it doesn't stand and fall with some demented techbro going rouge or not, so I think you're doing good.

@navi Like, Linus Torvalds throwing tantrums at NVidia will usually not cause your whole industry to have a meltdown.

@chris @skc @ramsey And I must ask, where is the joy or reward in contributing to this codebase?

Many of us need to argue for contributing to open source being a part of our nine-to-five. Even during my time at Automattic, fixing blocking bugs in the WP core was considered extracurricular or "not a good use of your time".

@chris @skc @ramsey Since I came back from the Rubyverse to WordPress, I have had the hunch that the WordPress project itself, its monolithic structure and its multiple appendices is deliberately designed to prevent a successful fork from ever seeing the light of day.

@chris yeah I've even been refusing on-site gigs things within the EEA for years by now, but I do understand having to fly in on a regular basis.

@chris well then.

This just in: Angry and confused man grasps at straws, as he abuses a non-profit's online presence to make a personal announcement. More at 11.

@chris 1984 has a US based LLC if that helps.

I'm not a huge fan of my 10th anniversary of moving to Beirut for my year with UNRWA and the SG's office having been spent holding my tears down as I'm watching the neighborhood across the street from my old office being bombed on cable news.

Also not a huge fan of Matt Mullenweg being allowed to keep being the be-all, end-all emperor-god of the most important web development framework (and CMS) in the world.

Anyway. Fuck this week. Fuck this month.

But still. It kinda funny to see the two of my circles of friends and acquainteces — WordPress people on one hand and diplomats and political scientists on the other — analysing a speech by a tired man that seems to be losing the hold he has on his followers as he uses religious rhetoric and us-versus-them mentality as he promises to seek vengeance.

One is Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress guy and the other is Nasrallah, the Hezbollah guy.

Anyone got a Laravel gig for me?

I'm really, really tired of being the WordPress person.

I also wish that 220 of my former coworkers hadn't been specifically targeted and murdered by the Israeli military in the past year, which is a war crime.

@nixCraft There are shareholders and hundreds of employees but the founder-and-CEO owns things like trademarks, domains names and even encryption keys.

@nixCraft The company is owned by a large well-established group of companies. The website says "we may be owned by Arbeitsfabrik AG but we're like a startup in spirit".

Turns out it is an LLC that is being sold off soon and none of the employees have access to the benefits provided by the parent company.

@nixCraft The workplace claims to be inclusive to those with different backgrounds than computer science but the recruitment process involves:

1. Calculating Big-O without specifying the operations that are available or other CS concepts and terminology.

2. A low-paid or unpaid trial process that ranges from 1-12 months, resulting in a financial or mental health breakdown and then love bombing at the end of the process (read any books about how cults actually work)

@nixCraft 4. The company is originally US-based and claims to offer several benefits to its employees which turn out to be the legal minimum in your own country.