Blog | Timi Wahalahti

Small life update

Updating my now page was a long due. I’ve moved the task on Akiflow forward countless times. Now that I’m finally updating that page, I figured out tha I might as well write a small life update on the blog. Well, this post also acts as an easy way to tell some big-picture things simultaneously for a large number of folks, since I will be contacting some personally during the coming days.

To those who might not have known previously: I’m a partner in the boutique digital agency Dude. We focus solely on designing and developing solutions built with WordPress. The growth of the company during the last few years has accelerated since we decided to push things forward a tad more ambitiously. We’re now at nine employees.

This year started with big news at work. Few weeks into the year, one of the four partners told that he wants to step down from day-to-day work at the end of month. More about that on the company blog (in Finnish, sorry). tl;dr no drama related, he just decided that it was time to do something else after working with websites for 19 years as an entrepreneur.

This partner happened to be our CEO and sales person.

Maybe needless to say, even the stepping down was planned well together to be as seamless as possible, it has caused extra work load for the three of us remaining in day-to-day operations.

Be not mistaken, load would have been high anyways since all four of us had agreed earlier to put pedal to the metal and go to the moon Our plans for future were, and still are, very ambitious. A little more about this again in company blog (and again in Finnish).

I appreciate and love my partners. Couldn’t imagine running the company with anyone else than them. And I’m thankful about the fact that years ago they trusted to hire me as an first employee. Working together to grow the business is best thing I can imagine doing now and in foreseeable future.

Given the situation and our plans for Dude, I’ve needed to switch my focus from multiple different things to almost solely into our company. That means time contributed to WordPress project has decreased dramatically. Cycling club and advocacy work has also decresed into the lowest possible amount acceptable for chairperson.

All that is more or less planned and conscious choice. I’ve should have made these decisions bit earlier. And most importantly, inform some folks earlier. But it’s hard. It’s real hard when you love everything you do, want to help all the important projects and support the people in these communities.

In case you have any questions, thoughts or just want to talk or say hi, and I haven’t yet reached out to you – feel free to connect. Always happy to chat

HeroPress essay: Finding My Place In The World

Recently I had the opportunity to share my story in HeroPress. Thank you Topher!

Read or listen to the essay in English or Finnish on HeroPress.com.

Services and apps I use weekly

I find people sharing their toolbelt of different services and apps interesting, as those appeal to the mindset that is always looking for shinier alternatives and ways to trim any overhead off from days.

Haven’t shared my toolbelt earlier, so decided to do so. My philosophy for services and apps is that the simpler it is, the better. Many do try to solve too many things and pack features that are only loosely related, ending up being nightmarish for users.

I’ve been using the majority of the items listed for years now – it’s up to you to decide whether it tells something about them or me. In any case, hope you find some new services or apps to give a try!

On mentoring a flagship WordCamp

This post turned out to be a long one. Fill your WCEU2022 Flaske bottle or favourite cup with your preferred refreshment and sit back.

To whom didn’t already know, I mentored the WordCamp Europe 2022 in Porto, Portugal which ended just a few days ago. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by volunteer organisers that are fellow WordPress users from our community. WordCamp Europe is something that we call a flagship event; a big conference spanning 2-3 days that gather attendees who represent a broad geographical area. Currently, our community has three flagship events: Europe, US and Asia.

Stop Resilio Sync from draining your macOS battery

At work, when developing WordPress sites we share the same database and media files between all developers as well as with staging. This means, that every time someone uploads a new image to the WordPress media library, the image needs to be transferred to other developers as well.

Fighting against work boreout

In the Finnish coding related Slack community, Koodiklinikka, was a good discussion about work boreout.

That discussion got me thinking, and I almost said that I’ve never suffered such a thing. In fact, it has happened once. So I thought, why not share few tips on how I battled it then and how I battle it today.

WordPress and climate emergency

Climate emergency is here. There’s no doubt about that.

We are not here for me to tell everyone what climate emergency means or what it causes to everyone’s daily life in the coming years. We are here because I realised something uncomfortable.

WordPress community does not talk about climate emergency ~~at all~~ enough. *

How to disable user status updates in BuddyPress

I’m extending the client’s website to have social elements like public profile pages, profile activity, some custom-created content and such. Because I do like to build things myself, my first thought was to build all of this by myself from start. Not so great idea after thinking it thoroughly through.

I did look up some different options and landed to use BuddyPress as a core to provide all the usual profile things and such. It seems to work very well together with Restrict Content Pro which is a huge advantage. But oh well, I think you are not after the story about the site and plugins used.

BuddyPress has a lot of actions and filters to modify it, so it was a little surprise that there is no filter to disable status update functionality in user activity streams. That little text area where user can write their updates like it was a Facebook or something… The updates are then visible on users or in the selected group’s activity stream.

On switching jobs.

I feel like this year has again started with many posts about how people are switching jobs. Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure it has been the right move and I’m really happy for them. Nevertheless, it has caused a little bugging feeling inside me.

When people share about their new jobs, they are justifiably always excited. The little bugging feeling is, that I think those posts do need a counterbalance. In the form of posts telling how great people’s current job still is. Otherwise, it’s easy to fall into thinking that you should find a new job just because “everyone is changing jobs, should also I?”.

Using the same database for development and staging environments with WordPress Network

Here at Dude, we use the same database for the site’s all development and staging environments. With this neat arrangement, we always have the latest content shared between our developers, which is crucial as the team might be working on the same project at the same time. No need for database migrations or moving dump files. Backend developer can just tell to frontend developer that the new page is there and needs styling.