It was a pleasant surprise to see this notification pop up last week as its been 9 years since joining the WordPress community!

Howdy Automattic!
Just a quick note to share the news that yesterday was my first official day as a Happiness Engineer for Automattic. The awesome company behind WordPress, Jetpack, Akismet and a whole bunch of cool products.
As many of you know, I’ve always been a huge fan of WordPress so after working at Sydney University for 12 years, let the new adventures begin…
JavaScript Goals for 2017
I thought I’d share what I recently watched that inspires me.
Jennifer De Walt shares her experiences (at JS Conference 2014) of how she learned to code by creating 180 websites in 180 days. It’s inspirational to see how she shares her successes and failures with the audience. Jennifer also mentions that with every site she creates, it is accompanied by a blog post (for each day) and the code is in a GitHub repository. In the past, I’ve tried to demonstrate what I’ve learned using CodePen in addition with GitHub.
As a result, I’ve decided I really want to learn more about JavaScript before delving deeper into jQuery. There are many posts that debate which to learn first. Below are a few examples;
- Should I Learn JavaScript or jQuery First? – Tom McFarlin
- Why You Should Learn jQuery Before JavaScript – Chris Castig
- 5 Reasons Why You Need To Learn To Use JavaScript Before jQuery – Kai Gittens
- Why Beginners Should not Learn JavaScript through jQuery – Awal Garg
As much as I love to copy and paste jQuery scripts, I would like to gain a better understanding of the fundamental reasons of why I should be coding in a certain way and to know the background of what I’m doing instead of merely copying and pasting scripts (Thank you Stack Overflow!)
Another reason to learn JavaScript was that, Matt Mullenweg (CEO and Founding Developer of WordPress) recently made this comment at the 2015 State of Word Conference, “learn JavaScript, deeply”.
What do you want to learn today?
Organising with Trello
On my quest to becoming more organised and productive, I’ve read about how awesome it is to use Trello. Not just for team collaborations but for individuals. The use of card sorting and organising lists appealed to me so the next logical step was to think how I could best use Trello productively. Was it for my Web Development work? blogging? or to organise everything else in my life!?
How To Harden Your WordPress Website For Better Security
My latest blog post, “How To Harden Your WordPress Website For Better Security” was published by INKth.com last night.
How To Harden A #Wordpress #Website For Better #Security https://t.co/G3gj8EzENS #InfoSec #WebTips via @AdelineYaw pic.twitter.com/uleKu1S3iQ
— Hoi Sze Lam (@hoiszelam) January 5, 2016
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Thanks to Hoi-Sze Lam from INKth.com for the opportunity.