Alex "Gus" Gustafson

  • End of the Meetup

    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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  • Automattic 10th Anniversary Party

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    (Left to right: Trevor, Tish, Jason, myself, Chad)

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  • Small Engagement with Big Results

    One of the lessons I learned from Susan Cain’s Quiet is that when you find yourself in a social environment outside your comfort zone, you can mitigate it by finding more reasonable avenues of engagement within the same setting. The “deep conversation” in the corner of a crowded dinner party comes to mind. While at the Grand Meetup, I’ve been doing my best to not be overwhelmed in the more populous moments. 400 people altogether can lead to being lonely and surrounded at the same time.

    My main tactic for this has been to force smaller groups on myself and engage as best as possible with them. Anyone else I meet and converse with is just gravy. Some of these moments would be:

    • The 4-to-6 person dinners we have each night
    • The 15 people in my Javascript class
    • The 1 person whom I’m playing Magic: The Gathering with at any moment
    • The person right next to me at a larger breakfast or lunch table
    • The players of the Dungeons & Dragons game I run

    These are all much easier for me to handle, and I’ve found that by focusing on how to meet people through these avenues I’ve been able to give myself plenty of time to recharge socially and still meet a ton of new folks. It’s unreasonable to expect myself to feel truly comfortable in the loud party room, but absolutely expected of myself to feel comfortable playing Magic 1-on-1 in that room.

    As of this writing, I’ve met 161 of the near-400 automatticians. This is far more people than I’d meet if I came here flying by the seat of my pants socially. But not once have I dived in headfirst to a crowd of strangers (which is terrifying,) it was all through small, expected engagement with opportunities I could easily find (which is fun.) Good results also makes me feel less guilty about spending a couple hours each day in my room to both call my wife and recharge my batteries.

     

    Photo by Payton Swick

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  • What a Morning

    bigredbutton

    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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  • Elements of Air

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  • One Year at Automattic

    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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  • Meetamattician

    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.

    Matticspace
    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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  • Magic the Gathering Sealed Deck

    Seeing as this is the first time I’ve ever built a MTG deck (instead of letting a computer do it for me) I found this guide super helpful:

    “Your First Sealed Deck” by Jeff Cunningham

    I didn’t stick to those steps strictly, but it was a good guide to begin with and I’m happy with the choices I’ve made.

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    Hat tip to Matty Cohen for the article

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  • Have Board Games Will Travel

    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.)

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  • By Any Other Name

    Amber and I have this habit of never calling anything by it’s real name. She suggested I share some examples:

    • Amber = “Ber”
    • Bagheera = “Baggy Pants”
    • The TV show Psych = “Pineapple”
    • Staying in bed cuz you feel like it = “Burritoing”
    • A Candy Corn-flavored latte = “Candy Corn Kate Spade”

    That last one barely makes any sense but it really has stuck.

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