This is the second “WIP Wednesdays” post, and it’s a day late. Oh well… it’s been a busy week! Here’s what I did…

Highland Games prep

This is the second year in a row that we’re having highland spring training at the park across from my house.

This year I’ve made myself new implements for sheaf and hammer:

• a new sheaf bag (not sure how much it weighs yet)
• blades for boots for the hammer throw (aka, “murder boots”)

I’m going to smoke up some meat and looks like it’ll be above freezing. Should be a good time!

My Reads plugin update

Went through another round of fixes from the WP Plugin Review Team (y’all are great, thank you so much!). Seriously, every WordPress developer should submit a plugin to the repo to go through the process of getting your code reviewed. While a lot of this is automated with the Plugin Checker plugin, it’s a great learning experience.

For example, I had no clue I could sanitize over an array with the map_deep() function. Very helpful for a $_FILE upload.

Hopefully I’m using it right, we’ll find out…

Recording and audio production

Met with my friend and recorded some scratch tracks of her songs. That was a cool experience, sitting in her house, at her piano, recording vocals and her piano. Time to dig into her songs and see what can happen with them.

I’ve noticed that I listen to music differently now, as I think about audio production. What sound or layer are they adding to that snare? How are voices or instruments panned left or right to give a full effect?

It’s also interesting to listen to a song and think, “What am I going to add to this?” and “Where does this need to be modified to really shine?”. Figuring out the essence of a song and sound is really interesting. Very excited to figure out how to produce things.

Also, I’m realizing I don’t know what I don’t know and if I knew what I wanted as far as sound, I might not know how to achieve it just yet… It’s like that Ira Glass quote:

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. – Ira Glass

Not yet at least…

Github CLI updates

I’ve been keeping some “most used” CLI commands on this site for a while, and just updated them to include some Github CLI commands I frequently use.

Check them out, and if you have any you use with frequency, let me know!.