Well, you know I love an anniversary. But this is a big one! No, for real this time. After you’ve been at Automattic for four years, you get a new custom laptop with a lit up W (or Jetpack logo, or Automattic logo. I went with the W.) It’ll be a while before I actually get it, since it’s custom made and all that, but it’ll be worth the wait.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BaB9k_EgV8i/?taken-by=uncovermac

And next year is even better – a three month paid sabbatical after five years! I have already started planning how I’m going to use my time (organizing every inch of the house, rocking NICU babies, cooking a lot, you know, the usual.)

I was thinking about how Automattic has changed since I started. We have stats for everything, and I found this one:

You started on 2013-11-18. Of the 632 other Automatticians, 166 (26.3%) started before you, 2 (0.3%) started on the same day, and 464 (73.4%) started after you.

Wow! Yeah, we’ve grown quite a bit in the last four years. (And I hired 38 of those!)

I think there were about 45 Happiness Engineers when I started, and now there are over 200. We hadn’t yet acquired WooCommerce, Calypso wasn’t a thing, heck, we were barely offering live chat to our customers! Now users with the Business plan can upload themes and plugins! (Trust me, this is huge.)

I have traveled to at least 18 cities in the last four years for work – from Dayton to Auckland. I’ve been up mountains and dipped my toes in the sea. I’ve seen the sun rise in Utah and in Spain. Okay, I’ll stop being poetic now.

I’ve met amazing people, made amazing friends, learned so much. I can’t wait to see what the next four years holds.

(Can you find me?)

Oh yeah, and as usual, we’re hiring!