I’m not generally into winter or holidays. Rather ‘bah, humbug,’ I am. But I really do like the Snow setting on my WordPress.com blog. I will let it fall without end. Enjoy now until the beginning of January, the 4th I believe.
Category: WordPress
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It’s been really fun at Automattic as we built the new WordPress.com. It’s cool to manage a WordPress site so quickly and beautifully. On top of that, it made building the WordPress.com for Mac app a reality. I’ve been beta-testing the app for a month or so now and have been really pleased with it.
If nothing else, seeing that W in the dock is pretty cool.
When I’m on my big monitor at home I usually have the reader tab open at the smallest width on the side of my screen. It’s a quick way to have a lot of information at-a-glance and also see notifications quickly from all our company P2s. With that up it makes it easy to also create new drafts, because the new editor is so fast to load and autosaves quickly too.
The cool thing about this launch is that the product today isn’t really so different than it was yesterday. If you’ve been using WordPress.com over the last year and a half, you’ve been watching the product be built and released bit by bit. But what is different is that it’s now open source. Anyone can view the code, contribute to it, and use it to make the next cool thing in the WordPress community.
Some required reading if you really want to dig into this launch:
- Dance to Calypso || ma.tt – Matt Mullenweg’s announcement
- Welcome to the New WordPress.com and WordPress.com App for Mac – the official WordPress.com announcement
- The Story Behind the New WordPress.com – how the project codenamed “Calypso” came together, as told by its lead, Andy Peatling
- wp-calypso || Github – the open-source codebase!
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This will be day number 236 in a row that I’ve published a blog post. One hell of a streak. There aren’t many other things that I’ve done every single day, without fail, during that time.
It’s a habit I’m happy to have formed. It keeps me in touch with the product I support everyday. Writing has become easier, which helps with my other hobby of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s also helped me stay connected with my family, who I don’t get to see as often as I’d like. Anything big seems to make its way to the blog soon enough.
But the streak is something I don’t think I can maintain much longer. I don’t do enough interesting things to warrant a post everyday, and I’ve started putting less effort into any one post. That time would be better spent making cooler things less often. That said, I don’t want to fall out of the habit. So whenever the streak finally breaks, I’m going to treat it more as shift than a stop.
I’ll miss that notification everyday though.
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I was wrapping up my trial during last year’s grand meetup. When everyone got back I had a chat with my trial lead, Beckett. Reading the archive of that conversation, I now fully ‘get it.’ The week is exhausting: there’s a lot of building, bonding and learning to be done. But inevitably the automatticians leave fired up for what is to come.
Sleep deprived, travel weary, and forgetful of how to make their own food and do dishes, but fired up. Ideas for how to spend the next year abound and we’ll all start back this week with loads of expectations to keep the cool stuff going. I could notice the energy in every slack channel last year, and I’m truly a part of it this year.
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With a walkthrough from scruffian, today I got to deploy code to WordPress.com for the first time. That’s a cool/terrifying/exhilirating experience!
I also got this bonus good-feels around breakfast:
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It’s my Automa-versary! One year ago I officially became a full-time Happiness Engineer. We can pick our own titles, but I really like this one so I never felt the need to change it. My day-to-day has switched around some over that year, but doing my best to make people happy has always been at the center of it.
No better way to mark this than by looking around and seeing almost 400 other automatticians around me for our grand meetup. Any good I’ve done for Automattic in the last year has really been thanks to these wonderful colleagues. It’s an incredibly supportive and helpful group and I can’t imagine working with anyone else at this point.
Thanks to everyone for such a wonderful first year.
Here’s to many more!
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Last night I had dinner with Matt Mullenweg, Alex Kirk, Dean Royal, Trevor Montgomery, and Sarah Semark. Matt at some point asked if any of us had met each other previously. While a few had met earlier in the Grand Meetup, none of us had met each other before this week.
“Good! The script is working,” he said.
We have an internal profile system where everyone shares the little details about themselves. One tool within that is called “Meetamattician” where you can check off which fellow Automatticians you’ve actually met in person. Not every company would need a page like this, but with us it’s kind of fun because remote work means you only meet your colleagues face-to-face on rare occasions.
I’ve met 23% of Automatticians as of Tuesday evening. Apparently, at some point before the Grand Meetup the data from Meetamattician was used to created the dinner seatings so that people could meet others whom they’d not met. It’s no mistake that Matt got seated along with a table of folks attending their first Grand Meetup. It’s really these little bits of data that remind me how well Automattic is setup to make the use of the data we have. If we know folks want to meet each other and we have the data to help us nudge that along why wouldn’t we make the seating charts based off who hasn’t met whom?
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Apparently these are the board games I feel comfortable taking to the Grand Meetup. They’re all fairly small (good for travel) and easy-to-not-lose components (good for sharing with groups.)
Alex "Gus" Gustafson 