Introducing the WordPress Trac MCP server for those who are active in the project. Ask your AI assistant about any WordPress.org Trac—should be a big productivity boost.

Yes, like IRC, we’re still using Trac and Subversion. Sometimes the sure and steady tools wins the race.

This month I moved my IRC usage from LimeChat to Halloy.

A good time to look around because the best macOS IRC apps like LimeChat, Colloquy, or Textual are either sunset or haven’t had recent updates.

Why Halloy

• Open source: GPL-3.0, on GitHub, with regular releases.
• Plain-text config: one file for settings and one per theme, easy to keep in version control.
• Easy to tweak: most changes apply with a config reload. Font changes need an app restart.

Tips

Pin your highlights. Halloy’s window system allows many split-pane options; I load key highlights into a 100% wide pane with other channels below in 50% splits.

Make bot colors readable. Several of the 16 standard IRC colors nearly vanish on a Solarized background. A theme’s [formatting] table overrides them.

Hide old connect and disconnect lines. Set success.smart and error.smart to 300 under [buffer.internal_messages], and anything older than five minutes disappears. The reduce noise guide covers joins, parts, and quits too.

Pick a readable font that Halloy can load. A monospaced font that isn’t variable-weight works best. I’m using Menlo, since it ships with macOS and matches my other apps.

See my config

My config using Solarized dark and light themes with more tips & tricks is on GitHub under lancewillett/halloy-irc. The color fixes come from my LimeChat theme, Colloquial-Lance.

Then, with r33093: “stop Twenty Fifteen from hyphenating form inputs.” In those years I contributed ~900 commits to improve the yearly WordPress default themes between Twenty Eleven through Twenty Fifteen.

Today, with r62857: “retry Docker image pulls so a flaky registry doesn’t redden a green test run.”

Fast forward and I’m now a full-stack builder who can fix anything. My current focus is to use build/test tools to improve quality, security, and performance: automated checks, GitHub Actions, automating the security alert-to-fix loops.

Here are the receipts on my contributor profile: http://w.org/@lancewillett

Eleven years later, I’ve arrived back home. Let’s go!

Via “Tools & Thoughts for Leaders” by my teammate, Paolo Belcastro:

…two things inevitable: communication had to be text-first (that’s why the writing culture is so important to us) and asynchronous.

We don’t fight chaos—we embrace it.

Read Paolo’s post for all the details on how a text-first culture is the key to asynchronous communication. Including why we’ve added in some extra chaos back in, on purpose.

Great list! Here are my additions:

• You help your friends add PHP code to their website footer files to show the current date correctly (“here’s a code snippet”)

• You type /feed on any URL to try and follow via RSS

• You may have memorized a few Trac ticket numbers that you super-duper care about landing in core

• You naturally type URL fragments into the browser address bar, including /wp-admin

• You quickly navigate any site by searching with ?s=term or using /tag, /author for people, or /2025 for dates

• Yes, you “view source”… and then search for “wp-content/themes” and check out the stylesheet

• You help friends get a solid theme from the directory instead of downloading from the first Google search result

• You have a wp-config.php “paste from this file” for common patterns like how to turn on debug mode

What would you add? Are you a WordPresser, too?

Last week I spoke to Anthony (a product designer) and his co-host Katie Langerman (a systems designer) on their excellent podcast “Complementary” for Episode 64: Being Intentional About Quality with Lance Willett.

A fun and engaging conversation! We touched on many quality-related topics, including:

• How to champion quality in distributed teams
• Quality metrics: measures of success
• Giving and receiving feedback (and other team dynamics), especially between designers and developers
• Balancing craft, context, and care in product development

Take a listen on your favorite podcast player. I recommend Pocket Casts (an Automattic venture).

A fun conversation since MK and I have known each other 15+ years after working together at Automattic in the earliest days. I’ve followed his career and learned from listening to these insightful episodes over the years.

In this podcast session we also got into what it means to be a full-stack leader, the role of feedback loops in product development, and real stories from the trenches.

Listen here: https://www.betweentwocoos.com/automattic-chief-quality-officer-lance-willett-wordpress/

“Move purposefully and fix things.”

Doc Pop

This role is all about systems thinking, operational excellence, and the long-term compounding effects of quality work.

Whether working in design, code, customer support, or leading teams of people, I believe everything valuable in building a durable business comes down to quality and maintenance:

• What we tolerate sets the standard for the company.
• What customers experience is the ground truth.
• When we fix known issues quickly, we build trust with our users.
• When the flywheel of quality spins faster, the business will grow organically, with new features built on a solid foundation.

Business growth

In a crowded market, quality creates gravity to attract customers organically, which leads to loyalty and expansion with lower marketing/sales costs.

While fixing small bugs might not 10x your growth overnight, not fixing them will make 10x growth impossible over time.

Casey Winters

Shared responsibility

Cultivate a culture of quality where every team, from engineering to customer support, feels responsible for the customer experience. Quality is a shared value and responsibility, not just a QA step.

Move quickly to fix known bugs and the cost to repair only goes up to fix them later. “Fix issues before the ink is dry.”

Measure what matters: define clear metrics for quality and operational performance, review them relentlessly, but also listen to qualitative feedback – both data and intuition have a role.

• Establish clear standards and workflows, with tracking and stats to measure success; train folks on how to meet those standards and act as owners for their area.
• Ensure quality and housekeeping don’t go unowned; automate any audits and checks to save time and catch errors.
• Lightweight structure: just enough process.

Consistency

Operate from a standard, consistent set of tools across the company.

Standardization aims to:

• Improve execution: one tool to learn, one place to integrate with data, one place to add AI assistance.
• Increase visibility: single source of truth.
• Help corral costs: negotiate one bulk contract instead of many, smaller contracts w/ different vendors.
• Set & teach a higher standard: speed up training & onboarding, maximize the best of each tool.
• Spread knowledge & skills: give team members a smoother switch between teams inside the company.
• Speed: encourage a shipping mindset, where teams are empowered to build game-changing products faster, instead of wrangling a tool/vendor.

Many of the culture changes we seek as a company are powered by foundational quality work to streamline data, tools, and documentation. This sounds basic; yet, when this foundational work is in place, everything else operates better.

Feedback loops

Craft plus context for faster feedback loops.

• Craft: Quality as we see it; e.g., technical quality from building and testing code pre-release.
• Context: Quality as others see it. Oxygen in from outside, via customers and the community.

Put it all together

A world-class “head of quality” pays attention to both the big picture (strategy: culture, mindset, consistency) and oversees the day-to-day details (execution: bug fixing, automated testing, and quality metrics).

See also: Companies with dedicated quality efforts by Anthony Hobday.

1. Question all requirements, esp. if someone smart made them
2. Try to delete parts or steps in the process
3. Simplify or optimize what’s left
4. Accelerate cycle time
5. Automate

Source, Christian Scheb: Elon Musk’s Engineering Principles – The 5 Step Process

The order matters, since you don’t want to automate or accelerate work that doesn’t matter.

Challenge: How will I apply this rigor at work? In my personal life?

Highly recommend this talk, and agree with the notion that quality, craft, and care are competitive advantages.