I’ve been at Automattic just over two years, and each year, I’ve taken 4-5 weeks of vacation. I typically take 2 weeks in the summer and 2 weeks around Christmas. Then, there’s always a few other days I take off here and there.
I don’t need months of notice. I simply go to our internal AFK (“away from keyboard”) site and log that I’ll be out for some period of time. It’s interesting working at Automattic where I am judged based on what I contribute, not on how much I work.
If you’re interested in learning more about Automattic’s open vacation policy, check out Culture Amp’s post, featuring Lori McLeese (Automattic’s HR lead).
Lori McLeese has been the HR Lead at Automattic for the past five years working to make sure that Automatticians are set up to succeed. As a Human Resources expert, McLeese shares her wisdom on a popular topic affecting companies today – vacation policies.
We had a rough start last week, but have since been hard at work fixing the performance issues that we had on large networks (8 Million+ users), so be sure to check out the updates for your WordPress site and get the latest version!
While I came in late to the project, having spent the past month or two focusing on SSO for 4.1, it’s been an honor to work with my Poseidon team (Miguel Lezama, Dan Walmsley, Enej Bajgoric) to get this out the door. Many thanks to all Automatticians who also helped make this a possibility by settings up systems, testing, providing feedback, etc.
Jetpack 4.2 and 4.2.1 brings you performance improvements along with some important security updates and enhancements to existing Jetpack modules.
While I have contributed to a few Jetpack releases in the past, Jetpack 4.1 is the first release where I have contributed a significant amount of work.
The past couple of months I have worked hard on refreshing the Single Sign On (SSO) module. SSO makes it as easy as clicking a button to log in to a self-hosted WordPress site!
It was a fun project because I got to touch several different code bases, including: Jetpack, the WordPress.com API, Calypso (JavaScript version of WordPress.com), and the PHP parts of WordPress.com. Also, for each code base, unit tests were either created or updated.
Personally, this was an exciting release for me, but I’m stoked for the next two releases. We have some great UI and performance updates coming.
Check it out
Jetpack 4.1 dropped today. You can check out the release post for more information, or just head to your dashboard to update to the latest.
Jetpack 4.1 is here and it’s packed with performance improvements, new features, improvements to existing features, and bug fixes!
While I did have the opportunity to write most of the SSO code for the release, the SSO refresh in 4.1 was only possible because of the amazing team we have.
Rick Banister and Michael Arestad provided mocks as well feedback on the UX and UI.
Brandon Kraft provided lots of feedback, pointed out old issues as well as conflicts with other plugins, and even created a core patch to add more actions to the login form.
Jeremy Herve did a ton of work getting the release ready.
The entire division participated in pre-release testing.
My team reviewed my code and listened to my complaining.
If you’re interested in joining our team, we’re always hiring.
This past Thursday, one of my coworkers at Automattic gave a regex presentation from the back of a rental car. At one point, a nearby car’s alarm went off and everyone on the presentation heard the siren.
I was so amused by this, that I had to take a screenshot. In the picture, you’ll notice a headrest to the left of Dennis Snell’s face.
I wanted to share the screenshot because I felt it captured a bit of what the culture at Automattic is like. In a company where employees are allowed to work when and where they want, there’s bound to be a few moments like this. And while this is the first time I’ve been on a video call with someone in the back of a car, it is not the first time one of my coworkers has been in an interesting location.
This past Friday, WordPress.com announced free HTTPS for all sites on the WordPress.com platform. This includes *.wordpress.com URLs as well as custom domains such as mycoolsite.com.
On the backend, WordPress.com is using Let’s Encrypt to issue those certificates.
The Let’s Encrypt project gave us an efficient and automated way to provide SSL certificates for a large number of domains. We launched the first batch of certificates in January 2016 and immediately started working with Let’s Encrypt to make the process smoother for our massive and growing list of domains.
I suppose I’m a few days late in sharing this, but…
Apple has challenged the order, and today, Automattic has joined many leading Internet and technology companies in filing an amicus brief in support of Apple’s legal challenge.
This past week, I received an email from someone that was interested in working at Automattic. This person had found me on LinkedIn and asked if he could ask me a few questions.
After taking a look at the questions, I thought it’d be nice to go ahead and publish the questions and answers on my site in case others were interested as well.
Note: What follows are my personal thoughts and opinions. So, take them with a grain of salt.
1. What would an engineer’s work week/day look like? Meetings, new development, refactoring legacy code, planning for future architecture, customer support, etc.
I can gladly give you an idea of what my work day typically looks like. But, keep in mind that there are developers across the company that have different focuses, different teams, etc.
On a typical workday, I wake up as early as 7:15 am and as late as 8:30am. I usually start my day by immediately looking at any pings on my phone from Slack or the WordPress.com app. This gives me an idea for how quickly I need to start work. There are usually no disasters, which means that I take my time getting breakfast, catching up on company news, and finally I go “online” between 9am and 10am.
In regards to meetings, I average ~3 hours a week doing video meetings.
Calypso developer meeting
On Mondays, we have a weekly team video meeting. This is the only required video meeting. Besides that, there are usually a few video meetings that are optional. Each week there is usually a WordPress.com Calypso framework hangout. And some weeks there are learnups that are led by outside people or Automatticians.
Outside of those meetings, most of my days are spent on new features. For the past year, these new features have focused on porting functionality from legacy WordPress.com to the new Calypso codebase. If important issues come up, I will fix them before moving on. Otherwise, I try to focus on bugs in a sprint.
2. There’s a very negative Glassdoor review that heavily criticizes Automattic (though I always take reviews with a grain of salt). The reviewer claims that the company is very disorganized, the employees are apathetic about WordPress and other Automattic products, and that no one communicates with each other. Do you find any of this to be true in your experience?
I can understand how someone might view Automattic as disorganized. Automattic is now comprised of 400+ people that are spread across the globe. We work on A LOT of stuff. And to be completely honest, the first phrase on the Field Guide (internal documentation site) is “Welcome to the chaos.”
That being said, there are systems in place to minimize the disorganization and chaos.
Shortly after starting as a full-time hire, a new employee will be assigned a mentor. This mentor’s job is to help the new employee adjust to their new role and generally feel as comfortable as possible.
We use Slack, which makes it easy for real-time communication around a project or team.
We have internal P2s, which is where more important information is shared. P2s are especially important, because ideas can get lost in the black hole of chat. To read more about P2s and how we use them at Automattic, check out this Fast Company article.
I could come up with a few other tools/systems that help minimize the chaos that is remote work at Automattic, but let’s move on to the other part of the question.
Moving on to the statement of Automatticians being apathetic about our products – I certainly don’t agree with that.
3. Assuming that workers manage their time well, what kind of work hours should be expected (consistent overtime, 35-40 hours or less, not clocked, etc)? How flexible are the work hours (is it entirely up to the employee, as long as they get their work done)? Are engineers expected to be on-call?
I don’t keep track of my hours. I feel that a 40 hour work week is probably close to the norm. But, it’s hard to give you an answer, because, as far as I know, there are no systems in place to keep track of hours. We certainly do not encourage consistent overtime.
For the most part, Automatticians are free to set their own schedule. The only exception I can think of is that Happiness Engineers sign up for live chat shifts. But, even then, I don’t believe these “shifts” are full work days.
Are engineers expected to be on-call? I’ve personally never had to be on-call. I imagine that we may have some sort of on-call system for the systems team in case things get wonky in the middle of the night, but I’m not sure.
4. Do you feel there are good learning opportunities to become a better developer (or other non-programming skills)? Does the work get repetitive and stale, or is it new and challenging?
I have learned a ton while working at Automattic. As a developer, there is so much here that you can work on.
Do you have an itch for testing? We’re working on end-to-end browser testing and visual diffing.
Like JavaScript? The new version of WordPress.com runs on React, Node, Express, and all kinds of other stuff that I have yet to explore. The Mac, Windows, and Linux apps also use this same codebase with an Electron wrapper.
We have our own internal analytics system that is run by a pretty amazing data team.
I could go on and on. But, suffice it to say that there is plenty of interesting work to be done.
If you ever get to a point where you’re bored with your current work… do a rotation on another team for a few months, or just switch teams completely. Both are very common practices.
5. I know some open vacation policies end up with employees taking very little vacation time out of peer pressure. Do you feel that employees are actively encouraged to take vacation? How much vacation did most employees actually take this past year (if you had to guesstimate)?
I’m not sure that I could guesstimate that for you. But, I will say that we have a very healthy view on vacation.
We even have a widget on team P2s that says, “Whoops! You have no time off scheduled”, if an Automattician doesn’t have any time off scheduled in the near-ish future.
My first year at Automattic, I believe I took just over 25 days of vacation. I took two weeks for Christmas holiday, 1 week to study for finals, and 2 weeks for summer vacation.
6. Why did you want to work for Automattic (work remote, didn’t like last job, etc.)? What are the main things you like and dislike about the company after working there for over a year?
The benefits were a big push as well as it being remote work. But, the biggest push was that I would be working on WordPress, which honestly changed my life. Automattic was, and still is, a dream job for me.
I really have a hard time coming up with something that I don’t like about the company.
After 19 months, I think the thing I like most about the company is the people. I believe in Matt’s vision for WordPress and Automattic, I have a great team lead who I feel believes in me and pushes me to get better, and I have a great group of team mates who have become friends.
Mercury and friends drinking pisco sour in Lima, Peru
Do you have questions about Automattic?
Leave a comment below or use the Contact Page to send me your question.
Interested in working at Automattic?
Automattic is always hiring. Visit Automattic.com to get more information about and apply for our open positions.
Since Automattic is a remote company, the Grand Meetup each year is a special event which gets all of us together in one spot. At each Grand Meetup, there is a team photo. But this year, we also got some drone footage that was taken while we were setting up for the team photo.
This last October, Automatticians descended upon Park City, Utah for a week full of work and festivities. Since it’s been a few months, here’s a link to the #a8cgm tag which has several photos.
Here’s an incredible fact: together, you published more than 660 million posts on WordPress.com in 2015, and made more than 655 million comments.
2015 was an important year for WordPress.com. Automattic acquired Woo and hit its 10 year anniversary. Calypso was open sourced and Mac, Windows, and Linux applications were also launched.
Also, we hit over 400 employees by the end of 2015. From memory, we were at about 265 when I was hired on July 14th, 2014. ?
So we asked ourselves a big question. What would we build if we were starting from scratch today, knowing all we’ve learned over the past 13 years of building WordPress? At the beginning of last year, we decided to start experimenting and see.
Today we’re announcing something brand new, a new approach to WordPress, and open sourcing the code behind it. The project, codenamed Calypso, is the culmination of more than 20 months of work by dozens of the most talented engineers and designers I’ve had the pleasure of working with (127 contributors with over 26,000 commits!).
Today, Automattic open-sourced the codebase that runs WordPress.com. This new codebase is entirely API driven and includes technologies such as Node.js and React.
With my background being in developing WordPress themes for an agency, this past year has been one hell of a roller coaster ride as I’ve learned to work with this new stack. And while there were some stressful times as I retooled, I’m super excited for what I and we have been able to do
For more background on why we decided to rebuild WordPress.com, see Matt’s post titled Dance to Calypso.
While there’s a party every night of the grand meetup, the last night has been a special night the past couple of years that I have attended.
But, this year being the 10th anniversary of Automattic, the party definitely raised the bar for future grand meetups.
The best part of the night had to be the amazing performances by our Automatticans bands! With just a week of practice, they were able to put on a stellar performance. The Jane Doze followed our Automatticians bands and kept the party going until midnight when the party continued in the party suites for several more hours.
In close second, the photo booth was also amazing! I got several great pictures with friends, including our CEO, Matt Mullenweg
Want to work with an amazingly talented group of people that are helping to impact 24% of the web? Come work with us!
At the end of August, I had the opportunity to get together with some coworkers in Washington, D.C. so that we could collaborate on a project.
While it’s always nice to get together with coworkers, the highlight of the trip was definitely getting a tour of the West Wing of the White House.
Unfortunately, no photography is allowed in the West Wing, but I did get a few shots from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the White House Press Room, and a few memorials around the city.
June 23rd was the second hack day that has occurred since I joined Automattic in July 2014, and the first hack day that I participated in.
For this hack day, I chose to figure out something for functional testing since it’s 1) so far been a bit over my head and 2) could prove useful in my work at Automattic.
What is a hack day?
In the hack day announcement post, one of my coworkers described the hack day as:
The Hack Day is an opportunity to work on anything and everything around Automattic’s services and/or WordPress.
Personally, I looked at the hack day as an opportunity to learn a new technology that I’d been interested in but hadn’t had the chance to learn yet.
A new functional testing framework
A few weeks ago, I spent a full day trying to figure out why a functional test was no longer working on WordPress. Long story short, I was able to narrow down the issue to a conflict with PhantomJS and React, the latter of which now powers a large part of WordPress.com.
After figuring this out, I began to look into different testing frameworks that would allow us to test React, and eventually settled on WebdriverIO for the browser automation. This seemed to be a fairly easy choice because WebdriverIO:
supports multiple browsers (including Chrome which works with React)
is built with JavaScript
is able to be deployed on hosted testing services like SauceLabs or Browserstack
While I’m not sure I can call what I ended up with a “framework”, I am happy with what I was able to do in just one day.
I was able to get tests written for logging in and out of WordPress.com as well as testing deactivation/activation plugins through Jetpack Manage functioned as expected.
I went to WordCamp Philly this past weekend and worked the Jetpack booth. While I didn’t get a chance to visit any presentations, I did get to meet several people.
Here are some pictures from Saturday.
Sandbox at the WordCamp after party
Contributor Day
Sunday was contributor day, which saw a few dozen people get together to give back to the WordPress project.
It’s always great to be reminded of how many ways there are to contribute to the WordPress project.
I stuck to development, and decided that I would contribute by writing some tests. So, I joined a group of other developers and we worked on writing some tests for the dbDelta function.
