So, what started as a post about how companies encourage and welcome women into their company has become a pretty good discussion about the actual barriers that women face entering any kind of strongly tech field.

Double the women = way cooler.

Comments are wide open on this one. What do you guys think?

I’ve got a new project going. For this project I wanted to be able to have a few different sections of the site act like different sites, and I wanted to be able to share administration with many people of varying admining abilities. From what I’d read about WordPress Multisite, I figured it was going to be the easiest way to do it.

I wasn’t entirely wrong, but it sure wasn’t as easy as I’d expected it to be. Mostly for two small reasons.

The setup

I decided I wanted to try some local development for this project, on my laptop. A google search revealed: the easiest way I found was using a piece of software called MAMP. It installs PHPmyAdmin, MySQL, and Apache, and has an easy interface to help you set everything up.

I followed these directions in order to install WordPress on my laptop, and started on these in order to get MultiSite set up. I got to step five before I encountered my first error.

The error

The second part of Step 5 is to add the lines that the network installation gives you to the wp-config.php. I did that, added the .htaccess lines. I then went back to my install to log in, and was faced with the giant error:

After a lot of troubleshooting and attempting to duplicate the error on my VPS, I figured out that WordPress Multisite is completely incompatible with InnoDB, and my MAMP install was set InnoDB by default.

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Today one of my very favorite people is leaving the company that we have worked for, fought for, sweat for, cried and sacrificed for together. I’ve been here 4.5 years. He’s been here about a year longer than me.

Most techs don’t deal well with emotions. The longer I’m in this industry, the more I’m convinced that a lot of us are boarder-line alcoholics because we both don’t know how to deal with our stress levels, and don’t know how to deal with our emotions. (That’s probably true for a lot of professions, but this one I know for sure.) And my eyes are wet. So I’m gonna write it out.

Jay was an amazing mentor when I first hired in. I knew almost nothing about Linux (which is crazy to think about). All I had was customer service, and even that waned when I got so frustrated at not knowing what I needed to know. Jay took very good care of me in those first few months. He talked me through fixing so much, and fed me information as quickly as I could gobble it up. … and he wasn’t even in training yet.

As he and I both worked up through the ranks, and worked together to make this company better than it thought it could be, we started taking trips to get coffee. It was a small thing, but it ended up being one of the defining moments of our weeks: coffee together. We bitched, we problem solved, we discussed, we congratulated.

More than that, though, we supported. If there was a question to which I didn’t have an answer, Jay was my man.

I have been touched by Jay’s kindness, his genuine-ness, and his enthusiasm. Even though he and I do not interact as much as we did when we were in the same building, I am scared that without him in my day-to-day life I will fall short of what I can achieve. Now that he’s moving on to bigger and better things, I’m wondering how many people will fall short because he’s not around as much.

To avoid it negatively affecting people, I am going to hold myself to a higher standard: I will be as kind, genuine, and enthusiastic as Jay has always been to me, to everyone I encounter every day.

<3 you Jay. Let’s coffee soon.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that my nephew is absolutely the cutest baby on the planet, and that I’m not shy about telling you that.

DJ (David James) or deeje.

…okay fine. I may be a bit biased. But he’s still pretty damn cute. Last night was the first night he’s stayed with me. He was awesome, as expected. In November (at ~2 months old) he took his first family road trip with us to Texas. He only fussed the entire time was to tell us something was wrong. Wet, hungry, hot. Other than that he would just hang out, sleep, watch the sky go by, or play with his ma. (more…)