Author: Jacob Smith
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Everything is tabs vs. spaces
There is a classic debate in developer circles: tabs vs. spaces. Readable code needs indentation (or if your Python it’s mandatory) and how you indented the code with a tab character or with a number of spaces, was a matter of nearly religious fervor. Then code linting and formatting tools got good enough and integrated…
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From Express Trains to Italian Driving: Lessons Learned Getting Around Europe with Kids
Booking flights was one thing, but getting around once we landed was a different challenge. Our plan was to use a mix of trains, rental cars, and public transit. We looked into private cars for a few airport transfers, but they were more expensive and came with their own challenges. In the end we took…
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Stop 1: PA
It’s easy to tell if someone if from Pennsylvania, they rarely say Pennsylvania. To those of us from the Commonwealth it’s PA. Who has time for five syllable words? Starting the trip with a visit to my parents, sister, and her family made the most sense logistically. Much more importantly it meant that we were…
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Beyond Hotels: Finding Our European Sanctuary with Kids
We are fortunate that we are able to stay mostly with family on this trip. This put accommodations on “easy mode.”. However, we still needed to find places for our first few nights in Rome and for the night before our 6:30 AM flight from Naples. We looked at hotels in both cities. As in…
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Jet setting in a family way: Booking specific flights
Flight planning was a doozy, so this is a two parter, you can catch up on our overall strategy of preferring one-way flights in part one. Getting started We built our flights in stages. Timing mattered for our trip. Our Italian family wasn’t out of school until mid-July. That set the beginning of the European…
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How to get there from here: Air travel overview
After the initial excitement of the sabbatical and figuring out our destinations, the dream had to get real: booking flights. Planning travel can quickly get you into red strings attached to push pins across news clippings territory if you aren’t careful. “Wait maybe we want a 10 hour layover in Istanbul!?” Here’s how to stay…
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Dreams meet reality: How our European family adventure took shape
After the initial excitement of the sabbatical news the next big question loomed: Where in Europe should we actually go for three whole months with Tom (7) and Jerry (4)? For some families, this might involve poring over maps, spinning a globe, or making a collective list of dream destinations. For us, the starting point…
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So you want to take your family abroad? Here’s where we started.
Every five years at Automattic earns you an irresistible benefit: a two or three month paid sabbatical. I have no idea why someone would choose two months, but it’s there. My sabbatical is coming up in just a few weeks just in time for when the kids, who are four and seven, are out of…
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A summer to remember
This summer I get to take advantage of a three-month sabbatical from work. You get one every five years at Automattic. Our plans center around a four week trip to visit family in Pennsylvania, Italy, and Belgium and friends in Norway. We will use eight different airports, two train stations, metro, light rail, rental car,…
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Looks who’s back
I have returned this blog to WordPress, perhaps where it should have been all along, since I work at WordPress VIP. My Jekyll install was so out of date I couldn’t get it running again so I used an intermediate script to get my Markdown into a WordPress import and with a little cleanup here…