I recently came across some AWK code from a work colleague that I did not understand at all awk -F'\t' -v OFS='\t' 'FNR==NR{a[$1]=$1;next};$1 in a{print $1,$2,$3}' file1 file2 I usually like to understand code instead of blindly copying and pasting, so I did a little research into what this was doing. Searching for “awk FNR NR” got me to this stackoverflow page: linux – What is “NR==FNR” in awk? And that led me in turn to this excellent article about […] (Read more)

I was reading a shell script today and came across the trap command, which I was not aware of. Some googling led me to this article: How “Exit Traps” Can Make Your Bash Scripts Way MoreRobust And Reliable , which has a really nice explanation. Basically, trap acts sort of like a finally block in a try/catch pattern. Very useful for shutting down services, cleaning up temp files and such. I think that trap is specific to BASH, so you […] (Read more)

At Automattic, we have a lot of data from WordPress.com, our flagship product. We have over 90 million users, and 100 million blogs. Our data team is constantly analyzing our data to discover how we can better serve our users. In 2015, one of our big focuses has been to improve the new user experience. As part of this we have been doing funnel analyses for our signup process. That is, for every person who starts our signup process, what […] (Read more)

According to my city’s website to pay my water bill, I am both a verified and an unverified user. Not sure how that it is possible

Today is my first official day at Automattic. I am excited!