DEV Community: Courtney Robertson

The Web Remembers Who We Are: Building XFN for WordPress in 2025

Courtney Robertson — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 15:02:45 +0000

The Web Remembers Who We Are: Building XFN for WordPress in 2025

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about: we’ve spent the last fifteen years building elaborate platforms to tell the internet who our friends are, what we’re eating, and which former classmates we’d rather avoid. We handed our social graphs to corporations, who promptly monetized them, sold them, and occasionally leaked them. And the whole time, buried in the HTML spec, sitting there since 2003 like a patient houseplant, was an excellent way to just… say how we know people. That’s why I built an XFN WordPress plugin.

It’s called XFN. XHTML Friends Network. And I built a WordPress plugin for it because I went down a fediverse rabbit hole and realized we’ve been doing this the hard way.

Link Extension for XFN

The Spark

I didn’t wake up one morning thinking “the world needs more microformats.” I got to XFN the way most of us get to old web standards: by accident, through Mastodon, while trying to understand why rel="me" actually matters.

If you’re on Mastodon or anywhere in the fediverse, you’ve probably done the little verification dance. You put a link on your website back to your Mastodon profile with rel="me", and Mastodon checks that your site links back to your profile, and boom—you get that satisfying green checkmark. No central authority. No verification badge marketplace. Just two sites pointing at each other, saying, “yep, same person.”

That’s when it clicked for me. Not the mechanism—I understood the mechanism. It was the philosophy. We don’t need Twitter (sorry, “X”) to tell us who we are. We don’t need Meta to map our social graphs. We just need websites that can say “I know this person” and “this is me” in a language browsers already speak.

So I started digging into rel attributes, which led me to microformats, which led me to the IndieWeb, which led me—inevitably—to XFN. And reader, I fell hard.

What Even Is XFN?

XFN is beautifully simple. You know how you link to people on your website? Your blogroll, your “about” page, that list of contributors, the little footer links to your Twitter and GitHub? XFN just adds one tiny attribute to describe how you know those people.

Instead of this:


<a href="https://sarahs-blog.com">Sarah</a>

You write this:


<a href="https://sarahs-blog.com" rel="friend met">Sarah</a>

That’s it. You’ve just told the web that Sarah is someone you consider a friend and have met in person. No database. No API. No OAuth flow. Just plain HTML doing what HTML was designed to do: marking up meaning.

The XFN specification gives you options for friendship levels (contact, acquaintance, friend), professional relationships (co-worker, colleague), family (parent, sibling, spouse, kin), romantic relationships (muse, crush, date, sweetheart), whether you’ve met physically, and—crucially—rel="me" for links to your own content.

XFN was the first microformat, introduced in December 2003. It emerged during the blogroll era, when people discovered that the web could be social without being a platform. Just people linking to people. Distributed. Messy. Human.

And then Facebook happened. And Twitter happened. And we forgot that the web already knew how to do this.

Why It Matters in 2025 (Or: The Fediverse Figured Something Out)

Here’s what the fediverse gets that corporate social media never will: identity should be portable, and relationships should be ours.

When you verify your website on Mastodon using rel="me", you’re participating in something quietly revolutionary. You’re creating a bidirectional link—a handshake between two places you control—that proves identity without an intermediary. No central authority hands out “verified” badges in the fediverse because there is no central authority. It’s just the web, doing what the web does, but finally being trusted to do it.

This is precisely what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned with the semantic web: machines reading meaning from documents, relationships expressed in markup, a web where metadata isn’t something corporations extract from us but something we assert about ourselves.

And here’s where I began to have concerns. Big thoughts. The kind that makes you stare at your screen at midnight and whisper, “What if…”

What if XFN is just rel="me" for social graphs?

Think about it:

rel="me" proves identity across domains
rel="friend" could assert relationships across domains
rel="colleague" could map professional networks without LinkedIn
rel="spouse" could express family connections without Facebook’s relationship status dropdown

Right now, Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms must build and maintain their own social graphs. You follow people, they follow back, and it’s all stored in databases. But what if your blog already declared who your friends are? What if a fediverse crawler could read XFN attributes and understand social networks that exist outside any platform?

The Dream: Distributed Social Graphs

I know what you’re thinking. “Courtney, this sounds like the semantic web fantasy that never happened. We’ve been here before.”

Fair. The semantic web has been “five years away” for twenty-five years. But here’s what’s different now: the fediverse proved people actually want this.

We have millions of people who voluntarily left Twitter for a more complex, federated system because they wanted to own their online presence. People are running their own Mastodon instances, setting up personal websites, adding rel="me" links to verify their identity. The IndieWeb community has been doing this quietly for over a decade with microformats, webmentions, and IndieAuth.

The appetite is there. The infrastructure is there. What’s missing is just… connecting the dots.

Imagine this:

Social discovery through web crawling : A fediverse instance could crawl your website and see that you’ve marked ten people as rel="friend met colleague". It could suggest those people to you when you join.
Trust networks : If three people I’ve marked as friend met all mark you as friend, that’s a pretty good signal you’re a real human I might want to know. Not an algorithm deciding—just the web saying “these connections exist.”
Portable relationships : Your social graph isn’t locked in a platform’s database. It lives in your HTML. You control it. You can export your WordPress site and your relationships come with you.
Privacy by default : Unlike Facebook’s social graph that assumes everything is fodder for ads, XFN relationships only exist where you publish them. Want to keep your family relationships private? Don’t put them in public HTML. Want to shout from the rooftops that someone’s your best friend? Add rel="friend met muse" and make it semantic.

This isn’t science fiction. This is just the web doing what it was always supposed to do, using standards that have existed for over twenty years.

Why WordPress? Why Now?

WordPress powers 43% of the web. If we want XFN actually to get used—if we want distributed social graphs to be more than a nerdy dream—it needs to be where people already are, building websites, writing posts, linking to each other.

The block editor (Gutenberg) made this possible in a way the old Classic Editor never could. I could add XFN options directly into the link interface, make it collapsible so it doesn’t clutter the UI, add it to Button blocks and Navigation menus and anywhere people link to other humans.

And look, I’m a developer advocate for open source. It’s literally my job to help people get their message out, to make technology more accessible. Building this plugin was me practicing what I preach: the web should be open, standards should be usable, and you shouldn’t need a computer science degree to participate in the semantic web.

Plus—and I’m just being real here—I was annoyed. Annoyed that every conversation about social graphs assumes we need an app for it. Annoyed that we keep rebuilding the same walls around the same gardens when the web already gave us the fence posts.

What I Actually Built

The Link Extension for XFN is a WordPress plugin that adds XFN relationship options to the block editor. Every link—in paragraphs, buttons, navigation menus, lists, embeds—gets a collapsible XFN section where you can mark your relationships.

It’s designed to be:

Unobtrusive : Collapsible interface that stays out of your way
Accessible : Full keyboard navigation, screen reader support, WCAG 2.2 AA compliant
Standards-based : Just outputs clean HTML rel attributes
Plays well with others : Preserves existing rel values like nofollow and noopener

You can use it right now. It’s free, open source, GPL licensed. I built it for personal bloggers and IndieWeb enthusiasts who want their websites to speak the language of relationships.

The Part Where I Get Idealistic

Here’s what keeps me up at night in a good way:

What if we’re at an inflection point? What if the corporate social web is actually dying, and the fediverse isn’t just a niche but the beginning of something that takes?

The pieces are all there:

ActivityPub gives us federated social networking
rel="me" gives us distributed identity verification
Webmentions give us cross-site conversations
Microformats give us semantic metadata
XFN gives us portable social graphs

We don’t need to invent anything new. We just need to use what the web already provides.

And yeah, I know. I’m not naive. Adoption is hard. Standards wars are real. Getting people to care about semantic markup when TikTok exists is an uphill battle. But the fediverse showed us that people will do harder things if they believe in the “why.”

The “why” here is pretty compelling: What if your friendships weren’t assets on Meta’s balance sheet? What if your professional network wasn’t LinkedIn’s moat? What if the web just… remembered who we are to each other?

What Happens Next

Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe this plugin helps five people, and three of them are me on different websites. Maybe it sparks something bigger. Maybe someone builds a fediverse bot that crawls XFN relationships and does something wild with them.

What I do know is this: every time someone uses rel="friend" or rel="colleague" or rel="me", they’re participating in a web that’s a little more semantic, a little more human, a little more ours.

The web has always been better at remembering than we give it credit for. We just have to tell it what matters.

Try It Yourself

If you’re running WordPress with the block editor, you can install the Link Extension for XFN right now. Add it to your blogroll. Mark your friends. Link to yourself with rel="me". Join the weird little corner of the web that still believes in semantic markup and distributed social graphs.

And if you’re building something in the fediverse or IndieWeb space—a crawler, an aggregator, a social reader—consider looking for XFN relationships. Let’s see what happens when the web finally gets to be social on its own terms.

The web remembers who we are. We just have to remind it.

Sources & Further Reading

The post The Web Remembers Who We Are: Building XFN for WordPress in 2025 appeared first on Courtney Robertson.

Post Formats for Block Themes: My First WordPress Plugin After 11 Years

Courtney Robertson — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 23:08:51 +0000

Post formats for block themes have been missing since Full Site Editing launched, and I finally built the solution. I’ve been contributing to WordPress training since 2014. I wrote lesson plans for Learn.WordPress.org. I teach people how to build with WordPress. I’ve spent over a decade helping others create plugins and extend WordPress.

But I’d never actually published my own plugin.

That changed last week when Post Formats for Block Themes went live on WordPress.org.

Post Formats for Block Themes

Post Formats for Block Themes: What’s Been Missing

I’ve known that post formats were missing from block themes since they launched. If you’ve been using WordPress long enough, you remember when Twenty Thirteen introduced post formats and how few themes actually supported them well. The feature always lived awkwardly between theme territory and core functionality.

Then block themes arrived with Full Site Editing, and post formats just… weren’t there. The feature that let you create beautifully formatted quotes, galleries, status updates, and chat logs got left behind.

That’s why I built Post Formats for Block Themes—to solve this gap properly.

lSelect your format when you add a new post.

The Feature That WordPress Forgot (And Then Kind of Remembered)

Post formats were introduced in WordPress version 3.1, back in 2011, through Trac ticket #14746. They were controversial from day one—the community accused WordPress of “chasing Tumblr” by adding nine standardized content types (aside, gallery, link, image, quote, status, video, audio, and chat) that mirrored Tumblr’s post types almost exactly.

The feature never quite worked. In 2013, WordPress 3.6 was supposed to launch a revamped Post Formats UI, but release lead Mark Jaquith pulled it during the Release Candidate stage with a remarkably candid admission: “The result just isn’t compelling, or obvious, or any of the things that it should be. It’s not just a matter of polish; it seems to be a fundamental issue with the concept.”

From Core Feature to Forgotten Functionality

Then post formats entered limbo. They stayed in core but stopped being developed. Theme support became spotty at best. When block themes launched with Full Site Editing, post formats just… weren’t there. Twenty Eighteen through Twenty Twenty-Four all dropped support completely. WordPress educator Morten Rand-Hendriksen even filed Trac ticket #32844 formally proposing the removal of post formats from core entirely.

The irony? In 2019, Automattic acquired Tumblr itself—the platform WordPress was accused of copying—for approximately $3 million (down from Yahoo’s $1.1 billion purchase). They announced plans to migrate Tumblr’s 500+ million blogs to WordPress infrastructure, then quietly shelved the project due to costs. Matt Mullenweg recently called it his “biggest failure or missed opportunity.” The feature that was supposed to make WordPress more Tumblr-like remains in core, barely used, while actual Tumblr bleeds money under Automattic’s ownership.

Then came Twenty Twenty-Five, which quietly restored support for all nine post formats using block patterns and Query Loop filtering. It was a signal that maybe—just maybe—post formats still mattered. But the implementation was incomplete. Block themes still don’t have proper format-specific templates. The old UI limitations remain. And developers who want to actually use post formats properly are left cobbling together their own solutions.

That’s the gap this plugin fills.

Why Post Formats Matter to Me

This isn’t just scratching a random itch. I wrote the first two lesson plans about post formats for Learn.WordPress.org:

I love post formats. They’re elegant. They solve a real problem: different content types need different presentations. A quote post shouldn’t look like a gallery. A status update shouldn’t have the same layout as a long-form article.

More importantly, I need this to work with the IndieWeb and Fediverse Activity Plugins I’m building with. Post formats are foundational to how I want to publish content across decentralized web protocols.

What It Actually Does

Post Formats for Block Themes brings all 10 classic post formats to modern block themes:

Quote
Gallery
Status
Chat
Link
Image
Video
Audio
Aside
Standard

But it’s not just a port of old functionality. It’s been rebuilt for how we use WordPress now. Here’s what makes Post Formats for Block Themes different from just enabling the old feature:

The Chat Log Block

This is the feature I’m most excited about. I wanted to include video captions, so I built a chat log parser that handles transcripts from Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and even subtitle formats like SRT and VTT.

You paste a conversation transcript:


john.doe 9:30 AM
Hey team, great job on the project!

jane.smith 9:32 AM
Thanks! Couldn't have done it without everyone's help.

And it formats it properly with semantic HTML and styling. Perfect for documenting team discussions, customer support conversations, or interview Q&As.

john.doe9:30 AM

Hey team, great job on the project!

jane.smith9:32 AM

Thanks! Couldn't have done it without everyone's help.

Auto-Detection That Doesn’t Force Your Hand

The plugin analyzes your content and automatically suggests formats. It can detect quotes with attribution, short status updates, and links. But it never forces a choice. You’re always in control.

Templates and Patterns

For developers: the plugin adds format-specific templates to the Site Editor (single-format-quote.html, etc.) and includes block patterns for each format using the modern WordPress API.

Want quote posts to have a different layout? Edit the template. Want galleries full-width? Done.

The Hard Parts

The hardest part wasn’t the code itself. It was mentally organizing how everything fits together with the new post pattern, modal, patterns, and templates. And then QA testing the chat log block to make sure it actually parsed all those different formats correctly.

The architecture took time to get right. WordPress has evolved so much in the past few years. Patterns, template parts, and the Site Editor. It all needed to work together cohesively.

Why I Open-Sourced It

The plugin is on WordPress.org and fully open source on GitHub.

This needs to remain truly open source. I want people to learn from it, contributors to improve it, and—honestly—WordPress Core to review it and consider including native post format support in block themes.

Post formats have been in WordPress since 3.1 (2011). They shouldn’t disappear just because we moved to block themes.

What I Want You to Do

If you’ve been missing post formats in block themes: install this and use it.

If you’re learning WordPress plugin development, read the code on GitHub. See how a modern plugin works with patterns, templates, and the block editor.

And if you’ve been thinking about publishing your own plugin but haven’t yet, take this as your sign. I waited 11 years. Don’t wait that long.

This is a monumental personal milestone for me. After over a decade of teaching others how to build with WordPress, I finally shipped my own plugin. It feels good.

Try It

Install from WordPress:

Plugins > Add New
Search “Post Formats for Block Themes”
Install and activate

Or via WP-CLI:


wp plugin install post-formats-for-block-themes --activate

Or clone from GitHub:


git clone https://github.com/courtneyr-dev/post-formats-for-block-themes.git

What’s Next

I’m already thinking about better integration with ActivityPub, POSSE, and the broader IndieWeb ecosystem. That’s where this really gets interesting for me.

But for now, I’m just happy this exists. And that I finally shipped my first plugin.

Resources:

If this helps you, leave a review on WordPress.org or star the repo. And if you find bugs or have ideas, I want to hear about them.

That’s the story. Now it’s your turn. What are you waiting to ship?

The post Post Formats for Block Themes: My First WordPress Plugin After 11 Years appeared first on Courtney Robertson.

This Week in WordPress 347: Evan

Courtney Robertson — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:14:28 +0000

This Week in WordPress #347

Tech Troubles & WordPress Wins — My Take on “This Week in WordPress” #347

The episode opened with classic live-show gremlins—glitchy audio, misbehaving embeds, and post-WordCamp brain fog. The chaos set an oddly perfect tone: WordPress work is messy in real life, yet progress continues to happen. The links below point to the original sources Nathan gathered for the show, so you can jump straight to the good stuff.

Security pulse

Security stories landed fast and practical this week. Melapress published its 2025 survey, a crowdsourced snapshot of what WordPress pros actually worry about. An interesting tension emerged: uptime often takes priority over compliance on lists, even as regulations ramp up. Worth a skim if client conversations keep drifting to “just keep the site up.” (Patchstack)

Patchstack flagged a critical SQL injection that’s already patched in the Paid Membership Subscriptions plugin. If the plugin resides in a stack, update it before finishing this paragraph.

For a broad overview, SolidWP’s weekly report compiles plugin and theme vulnerabilities, providing the usual “is this in my stack?” triage value. (WP Builds)

Beyond WordPress, Cloudflare detailed how an attacker used a Salesloft/Drift → Salesforce integration path to access data. The write-up serves as a sober reminder that vendor chains can create a significant blast radius. Audit who gets access to what, not just what runs on a server. (The Delta)

Tools & tinkering

Alex Kirk shipped a handy update to the Playground Step Library : it’s now consumable as an npm package and has a friendlier UI for crafting blueprints. Spinning up shareable, pre-configured WordPress sandboxes just got easier for demos, training, and support. (Alex Kirk)

Publishing pipeline pro-tip: the official Google Docs → WordPress.com/Jetpack add-on still exists, quietly saving teams who draft in Docs and publish on WordPress. If collaboration happens in Docs today, this is “less yak-shaving, more shipping.” (WP Builds)

Two bite-size block/dev nuggets:

block.json primer for plugin authors who want cleaner block registration and better runtime behavior. Tight, technical, functional. (WP Builds)
BlaBlaBlocks Tabs adds accessible tabs to the editor with templates. Suitable for content teams that insist on “less scroll, more structure.” (WP Builds)

And a pair of utility updates:

WooCommerce 10.2 pre-release is ready for testing (product collection carousel, faster Cart block, better onboarding). Staging sites love this kind of week. (WP Builds)
DB Reset Pro offers one-click database resets while preserving uploads—useful for demo sites, but strictly for folks who respect backups. (WP Builds)

AI & the wider web

For context-seekers, the Financial Times explainer on transformers remains a crisp on-ramp for understanding why modern AI feels different. Pair that with Simon Willison’s running list of “vibe-coded” AI-assisted tools if experimental dev workflows spark joy. (WP Builds)

Publishers vs. crawlers continues to simmer. This op-ed walks through Cloudflare’s proposal to change the economics of AI scraping—food for thought for anyone whose content now fuels chat answers more than search clicks. (WP Builds)

Accessibility & community

Joe Dolson shipped WP Accessibility 2.2.0 with notable changes, and the WP Accessibility Docs project posted an August update—a good pulse check for teams improving baseline a11y instead of bolting it on at the end. (WP Builds)

The Accessibility Team also introduced new team representatives, with clear expectations about their roles. Community health beats shiny features in the long term; leadership clarity helps contributors pick a lane. (Make WordPress)

Multilingual & content ops

WPML 4.8 leans into AI translation with a “better than human” claim and a credit-based model. Whether that line lands or not, translation quality continues to improve, and teams with big content catalogs finally have options beyond “someday.” (WP Builds)

Events & extras

LoopConf (London, Sept 25) brings a focused, dev-heavy lineup. If a trip is on the calendar, WPLDN (the evening before) is an easy add-on for hallway-track energy. (WP Builds)

Two bonus links from the “not WordPress, still delightful” shelf:

Web Day Out (Brighton, Mar 12, 2026): a one-day love letter to what browsers can do today. Front-end folks, this scratches the right itch. (WP Builds)
Mitch Ivin’s Windows XP portfolio : pixel-perfect nostalgia as a portfolio site. Pure craft, pure fun. (WP Builds)

The post This Week in WordPress 347: Evan appeared first on Courtney Robertson.

🗒️ Exploring Developer Relations: Shaping Open Source and WordPress Communities

Courtney Robertson — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 13:34:42 +0000

🗒️ Exploring Developer Relations: Shaping Open Source and WordPress Communities

Developer Relations (DevRel) is all about connecting tech companies with developers. It's a key part of making sure techies have the tools they need and feel part of a community where their ideas and work are appreciated. DevRel pros build this important bridge, ensuring smooth communication and collaboration. Especially in open-source areas like WordPress, they play a huge role in bringing together different people to innovate and respect each other's contributions, making tech better for everyone.

As highlighted by Joost de Valk in his article on the need for more DevRel within WordPress, there's a gap in awareness and implementation of DevRel practices. Much like Community Management and other career paths, Developer Relations is a profession wider than the WordPress community. It is key within many technology companies and not limited to web development.

This is the first post in a blog series, aiming to illuminate the DevRel field, explaining its roles, impact, and how it can foster growth and innovation within WordPress. By doing so, I hope to bridge the knowledge gap and showcase the value of DevRel in nurturing the community and enhancing collaboration.

Developer Relations: job descriptions, areas of focus

Developer Journey Map

Developer Advocates/Evangelists: Promote technology via content, speaking at events, and social media. This is the broad job title, while the remainder of titles here are specific areas of focus.
- Developer Education: Offers resources for learning and effective product use.
- Technical Writers: Create documentation, tutorials, and guides for developers' understanding and use.
- Developer Marketers: Specialize in communicating within developer communities.
- Event Marketers: Specialize in promoting and increasing event attendance, creating memorable experiences that align with developer interests.
- Field Marketing: Engages directly with potential users or developers in the field, often at events or meetups, to build relationships and gather product feedback.
- Developer Experience Engineers: Enhance developers' product interaction, focusing on SDKs, APIs, and usability.
- Program Managers: Organize DevRel activities like events and sponsorships.
- Open Source Program Directors or Managers mix open source into company strategy, ensure rules are followed, boost community ties, and push for both internal and external open source contributions.

Why do we need Developer Relations?

Developer Relations is pivotal internally for fostering product innovation and understanding user needs, externally for building and nurturing a developer community around a product, and within an open-source ecosystem for encouraging collaboration, contributions, and shared advancement. It ensures that products are developer-friendly and meet community expectations, enhances brand loyalty, and drives technological growth through collective input and effort.

Contributing to WordPress as a Developer Advocate at GoDaddy aligns with my role's core objectives: enhancing GoDaddy's offerings and understanding WordPress better. It's about engaging with the community, sharing knowledge, and directly contributing to WordPress's growth. This involvement helps me gain insights into users' needs and challenges, ensuring GoDaddy's services remain relevant and beneficial for WordPress users. It's a reciprocal relationship where both GoDaddy and the WordPress community benefit from shared expertise and improvements.

Looking ahead in Developer Relations

Throughout this series, I'll cover topics like:

A day in the life of a Developer Advocate
Community Management within DevRel
Developer Advocates contributing to WordPress and Open Source
Developer Advocates working for WordPress hosts and extenders
DevRel Strategies for Success
DevRel Resources, Tools, and Technologies
Building and Nurturing Developer Communities
Contributing to WordPress: A Guide for Developer Advocates
Future Trends in Developer Relations and WordPress

Let's dig in to DevRel

As I wrap up this introduction to Developer Relations, I'm excited to delve deeper into its significance within the WordPress community and beyond. Together, we've explored how DevRel bridges the gap between tech companies and developers, fostering collaboration and innovation. Join me on this journey as we uncover the intricacies of Developer Relations and its profound impact on open-source communities like WordPress. Let's continue to learn, grow, and shape the future of technology together.

Book Review: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

Courtney Robertson — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 21:48:20 +0000

🎨 Impressions of Engineering Management

How I Discovered It

When the vast majority of the developers I follow in Twitter started sharing the release information of this book, I realized I needed to take a look. As a Developer Advocate, I am often reviewing my career path in light of both what engineers use AND community management that sits within a marketing department. I wanted to glean the insights of where I hope to be career-wise within several years.

Who Should Read It?

Whether you are an engineer, developer advocate, community management, on a career path to become any one of these, or a manager of these roles, you’ll want to read and reread this book. I would also suggest that team leaders, project managers, and supervisors will find it especially helpful. If you want to learn about effective management and leadership techniques as well as the significance of values in management and leadership, get your copy now.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

Clear set of values that guide managers’ and leaders’ actions and decisions. Become more aligned with their team and to develop a sense of purpose and direction.
Clear communication in management and leadership: It includes strategies for encouraging team members to share their thoughts and ideas and for fostering open communication.
Self-care for managers and leaders: The book emphasizes the importance of self-care for managers and leaders, as it can help to prevent burnout and ensure that they can perform at their best. It includes self-care advice such as setting boundaries.
The importance of effective goal setting and prioritization: The book provides detailed guidance on how to set and achieve goals, as well as prioritize tasks and projects. It demonstrates how effective goal setting and prioritization can lead to improved performance and greater team success.
Have a code of conduct that specifies what type of behavior is acceptable and what is not.
The significance of assuming good intentions and not closing a PR from an active contributor and reimplementing the same thing yourself.
Active participation in peer and mob programming: team members sharing their thinking through a problem, as well as wins and mistakes.
Fostering psychological safety: a positive developer experience, and a sense of alignment with the company’s goals.
When making decisions, it is necessary to check in with facts, find and rally around the positive, reject negative premises, and consider the consequences.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

When a person feels that their work is valued, that they have a North Star purpose both for their personal growth and for wider impact with the people and industry, it’s an incredibly powerful thing.

Building a team where a group of people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and lived experiences can thrive is how we create healthy working environments.
Building a team where a group of people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and lived experiences can thrive is how we create healthy working environments.

A team that’s motivated, has psychological safety with you and among themselves, has good developer experience within their tech stack, and feels aligned with the company’s goals will always perform better than one that isn’t.

📒 Summary + Notes

Good engineering management necessitates knowledge of power dynamics, organizational structures, and broad-based approaches. The necessity of fostering a positive team culture and a set of shared values is also emphasized. These factors can increase performance and create trust. The paragraph also emphasizes the significance of good teamwork and problem-solving, as well as the necessity for managers to assume accountability for putting their people in a position to succeed and keeping a positive attitude.

Clear communication, establishing and enforcing boundaries, and promoting a healthy and productive work atmosphere are all necessary for effective management and leadership. This entails giving justifications for denying or rejecting help requests, upholding a code of conduct, presuming goodwill, handling conflicts, and establishing specific objectives and timeframes. It also highlights the value of managers’ and leaders’ self-awareness and self-care, as well as the relevance of self-confidence and self-efficacy in attaining success. The paragraph also makes the case that minimizing technical debt and placing more emphasis on the system than on individual objectives may be beneficial for team success.

I. Introduction
A. Engineering management requires understanding power imbalances and people structures
B. Importance of considering strategies outside of a single project

II. The Role of Values
A. Values as fundamental beliefs that guide actions and determine what is important
B. Values provide context for understanding a person's mental state, needs, and motivations
C. Sharing values can build trust and vulnerability within a team
D. Core values help companies determine goals and create a stable direction forward

III. Building a Positive Team Culture
A. Regular team check-ins and discussions are important for success
B. Manager's role in setting team up for success and maintaining morale
C. Importance of alignment, challenging work, sense of togetherness, and fair treatment for achieving flow state
D. Importance of connection and positive reinforcement in times of stress

IV. Effective Communication and Problem-Solving
A. Importance of hearing feelings and needs behind a message
B. Peer and mob programming for sharing thinking and learning from mistakes
C. Checking facts, finding and rallying around the positive, rejecting negative premises, and reviewing consequences
D. Stepping away from volatile situations as a manager

V. Communication and Collaboration
A. Explain reasons for closing or declining help requests
B. Provide a code of conduct for acceptable behavior
C. Assume good intentions in confusion
D. Avoid closing PRs and re-implementing the same thing
E. Address and resolve personal conflicts

VI. Goal Setting and Prioritization
A. Objectives should be high-level goals that inspire a picture of the future
B. Values provide context for understanding a person's mental state, needs, and motivations
C. Sharing values can build trust and vulnerability within a team
D. Core values help companies determine goals and create a stable direction forward
E. Key Results are specific measurable pieces of data over time
F. Define future OKRs by looking forward and backward
G. Prioritize and make decisions that are right for you

VII. Team Management and Performance
A. Regular team check-ins and discussions are important for success
B. Manager's role in setting team up for success and maintaining morale
C. Saying no to give team bandwidth and space for what is critical
D. Keep track of unfinished work for stakeholders
E. A motivated, psychologically safe, and aligned team will perform better
F. Avoid splitting engineers

A Lot of a Lot

Courtney Robertson — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 18:23:17 +0000

Have you ever found yourself with more ideas than you can handle? Where do you begin making sense of what needs to be accomplished and finding a starting place?

I've been finding myself in this space drifting between the stacks of ideas, the piles of requests, and the entire marketplace of shiny new things. I am searching for the perfect thing for people I have in mind, much like shopping for gifts. Yet when faced with so many possibilities, it can be quite overwhelming.

In my physical space, I have taken the time needed to sort through the clutter. My kids' home classroom setup is much this way. While they've had the freedom to create with minimal boundaries, their works of art leave a trail of debris from the tornado effects of their creativity. Their creations were then overlooked and the space became too disorganized to appreciate. It sat cold and empty, but remained a mess. On a cold and rainy day with no other plans, we turned on some holiday music, warmed and lit the room, and began the work as a family of putting this space back in order. Since then, it has returned to an inviting and integral part of our daily routine.

In my mental space, things aren't all that different. I see the many opportunities and connections waiting before me. It all becomes so much at times that I drift along allowing Slack, social media, and emails to sort out my priorities in the moment. This is no way to make progress. I needed to start gathering ideas and organizing them somewhere.

2022 Reading

Over the past year, I've read and listened to many books. For maximum concentration, I often listen to the audio book while I read along on my Kindle iOS app and take notes. I started out with "How to Read a Book" to help get my head back into the mode of reading for studying. From there, I branched out to productivity and personal knowledge management. Several of these books were a re-read for me as it had been quite a while and I hadn't previously taken notes on them.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Technique/dp/3982438802/ref=tmm\_pap\_swatch\_0?\_encoding=UTF8&qid=1669916962&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Building-Second-Brain-Organize-Potential-ebook/dp/B09LVVN9L3/ref=tmm\_kin\_swatch\_0?\_encoding=UTF8&qid=1669917109&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity-ebook/dp/B00KWG9M2E/ref=sr\_1\_1?keywords=getting+things+done&qid=1669917233&s=digital-text&sprefix=getting+thing%2Cdigital-text%2C79&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Making-All-Work-Winning-Business-ebook/dp/B001AO0GRC/ref=sr\_1\_1?crid=30ZAE4XKKEMLW&keywords=making+it+all+work&qid=1669917304&s=digital-text&sprefix=making+it+all+work%2Cdigital-text%2C80&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Bullet-Journal-Method-Present-Design-ebook/dp/B07B7C4F9C/ref=sr\_1\_3?crid=1BMR98YQOT7CD&keywords=bullet+journal&qid=1669917336&s=digital-text&sprefix=bullet+journal%2Cdigital-text%2C79&sr=1-3

https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-ebook/dp/B004PYDAPE/ref=tmm\_kin\_swatch\_0?\_encoding=UTF8&qid=1669917162&sr=8-1

Downloading My Thoughts

With the knowledge gained from these books, I was read to capture the ideas. While "Getting Things Done" is a method for handling tasks, "How to Take Smart Notes" and "Building a Second Brain" are similar methods for handling all the information that flows by and through us. Capture, organize, synthesize, and share it for yourself later.

I have started into using Obsidian.md as my notes system, and Things 3 for my tasks. Articles I want to save and annotate go into DevonThink. I have been slowly building up my information system and keep the software tools open while I work. I collect the ideas, use a daily note as my digital bullet journal, and have weekly, monthly, and yearly check-ins with myself. I've also applied myself to learning all I can via Curtis McHale's courses.

[

Courses – Curtis McHale

curtismchale.ca

](https://curtismchale.ca/education/)

I have my invested the time to build out my methods, learned the tools, and tested the systems to meet my workflow needs. I am now primarily working on making this second nature to me. I can set up recurring routines for myself and use my tools to empower that. What I most need though is to always be capturing, prioritizing, and processing. This leads to a more organized top of mind state. I can refer to my tools and systems to recall what I need and help me to schedule times better.

Personal Growth

As I shift through careers as a teacher, software release communications, instructional designer, and now as a developer advocate, I see the many ways my own thinking has expanded. No longer do I have sequential tasks. Often, deadlines are mine to create. Organizing others around common goals is key to working in community management. Taking ownership over my own knowledge management is part of career growth. Allowing ideas and initiatives to drift along doesn't fit with reaching goals in a timely manner. It matters more to me now than ever before to be intentional about how I capture and collect the ideas.

I am moving from feeling there's a lot of work/ideas/initiaitives all over the place to finding order and organization in accomplishing these things. No longer is it a lot of a lot.

This article first appeared on:

Courtney Robertson -

by Courtney Robertson

Leveling up entry-level WordPress developers

Courtney Robertson — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 14:38:46 +0000

[

Leveling up entry-level WordPress developers – The WP Minute

In today’s episode of WP Product Talk, we’ll explore the methods organizations go through to level up entry-level WordPress developers on their team. This is a fantastic discussion with your weekly hosts Kim Colemen & Matt Cromwell. Today’s guest is Courtney Robertson, Web Design Dev Advocate at GoDaddy Pro. If…

thewpminute.com

](https://thewpminute.com/leveling-up-entry-level-wordpress-developers/)

Hamilton Township, US

This article first appeared on:

Courtney Robertson -

by Courtney Robertson

A WooSesh Chat with Paul Maiorana, Kimberly Coleman and Courtney Robertson

Courtney Robertson — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 17:32:23 +0000

A WooSesh Chat with Paul Maiorana, Kimberly Coleman and Courtney Robertson

This article first appeared on:

Courtney Robertson -

by Courtney Robertson

Unlearning Racism: Orange Shirt Day in the USA

Courtney Robertson — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:57:42 +0000

I live in a place that has historically been on the front lines of racism. I am only a few miles north of the Mason Dixon line - the invisible boundary between slaves and free people in the USA that spans much of Pennsylvania and Maryland. South of that line continued to permit slavery for nearly 100 years.

My home city of Chambersburg was burned to the ground as both armies marched 25 miles west to Gettysburg. Rebels demanded provisions and money or face destruction. The Rebel troops went on to Gettysburg with no additional support and ultimately lost the battle. USA Civil War covered many issues and was not a battle intended to end slavery, but it did put in motion addition events that would result in freeing slaves.

History is all around me. Yet there’s one area I really hadn’t explored. I remember in 10th grade learning about the Carlisle Indian School, located about 20 miles north from my home.

Just a year ago, a coworker shared with me about Orange Shirt Day. While primarily a Canadian observance, it seemed fitting that I take a day to visit the historical exhibits nearby and learn more about this part of my local history.

Richard Henry Pratt,founder of the school, believed “that to ‘civilize’ the Indian would be to turn him into a copy of his God-fearing, soil-tilling, white brother”.

It seemed to me that the efforts of the school were to remove the culture of its students and to replace generations of identity with an American approach, largely of European descent. Students from the school graduated with hopes of taking newly learned trades back to their reservations, but found little opportunity there.

It was such a somber experience to take in all this exhibit offered.

An odd contrast to the work of taking captive the Indigenous children by celebrating in the very same years that this region was a safe space for those fleeing slavery and an exhibit about housing prisoners of war.

DevRel tips for Hacktoberfest

Courtney Robertson — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 16:35:47 +0000

https://youtu.be/sAjrcKufge0

https://developerrelations.com/podcast/devrel-tips-for-hacktoberfest

This article first appeared on:

Courtney Robertson -

by Courtney Robertson

WP Watercooler EP429 – do_action: WordCamp US 2002 Contributor Day

Courtney Robertson — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 16:15:27 +0000

https://youtu.be/6KbCssSp\_Uw

[

EP429 - do_action: WordCamp US 2002 Contributor Day - WPwatercooler

This week on the show we are going to be discussing the contributor day that happened just after WordCamp US 2022 in San Diego. Joining us this week is a returning guest Courtney Robertson who is a web design dev advocate at GoDaddy Pro and WP Training team co-rep.

wpwatercooler.com

](https://wpwatercooler.com/wpwatercooler/ep429-do_action-wordcampus-2002-contributor-day/)

This article first appeared on:

Courtney Robertson -

by Courtney Robertson

WP Watercooler DevBranch EP21 – Post Formats Status

Courtney Robertson — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 16:22:07 +0000

https://youtu.be/2V3eHD3mpAk

[

EP21 - Post Formats Status - Dev Branch

This week on WPwatercooler's Dev Branch we have Courtney Robertson joining us to talk about the future of Post Formats in the Full Site Editor future of WordPress.

wpwatercooler.com

](https://wpwatercooler.com/devbranch/ep21-post-formats-status/)

This article first appeared on:

Courtney Robertson -

by Courtney Robertson

DEV Community: Courtney Robertson

The Web Remembers Who We Are: Building XFN for WordPress in 2025

The Web Remembers Who We Are: Building XFN for WordPress in 2025

The Spark

What Even Is XFN?

Why It Matters in 2025 (Or: The Fediverse Figured Something Out)

The Dream: Distributed Social Graphs

Why WordPress? Why Now?

What I Actually Built

The Part Where I Get Idealistic

What Happens Next

Try It Yourself

Sources & Further Reading

Post Formats for Block Themes: My First WordPress Plugin After 11 Years

Post Formats for Block Themes: What’s Been Missing

The Feature That WordPress Forgot (And Then Kind of Remembered)

From Core Feature to Forgotten Functionality

Why Post Formats Matter to Me

What It Actually Does

The Chat Log Block

Auto-Detection That Doesn’t Force Your Hand

Templates and Patterns

The Hard Parts

Why I Open-Sourced It

What I Want You to Do

Try It

What’s Next

This Week in WordPress 347: Evan

Tech Troubles & WordPress Wins — My Take on “This Week in WordPress” #347

Security pulse

Tools & tinkering

AI & the wider web

Accessibility & community

Multilingual & content ops

Events & extras

🗒️ Exploring Developer Relations: Shaping Open Source and WordPress Communities

🗒️ Exploring Developer Relations: Shaping Open Source and WordPress Communities

Table of Contents

Developer Relations: job descriptions, areas of focus

Why do we need Developer Relations?

Looking ahead in Developer Relations

Let's dig in to DevRel

Book Review: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

🎨 Impressions of Engineering Management

How I Discovered It

Who Should Read It?

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

A Lot of a Lot

2022 Reading

Downloading My Thoughts

Personal Growth

Leveling up entry-level WordPress developers

A WooSesh Chat with Paul Maiorana, Kimberly Coleman and Courtney Robertson

Unlearning Racism: Orange Shirt Day in the USA

DevRel tips for Hacktoberfest

WP Watercooler EP429 – do_action: WordCamp US 2002 Contributor Day

WP Watercooler DevBranch EP21 – Post Formats Status