Well, I can’t very well give a talk on Making Blogging a Habit and then just not blog, can I?
I should talk about my trip to Dayton. It was nice. The flight there was uneventful, as was the flight back, which nowadays is a pleasant surprise instead of, you know, just the way things should be.
The hotel I was staying in was attached to the convention center, so I didn’t see too much of Dayton, but dinner Saturday night was at an Irish pub in an interesting district not far from downtown.
I have to be honest, didn’t expect there to be a red light district (really red light 1/8 of a block) in Dayton, Ohio, but there you go.
I’m kind of skipping around here. Friday night was a speaker’s dinner, which was nice. I met some great people in the WordPress community, had a delicious meal, and got to see some of my coworkers.
A lot of people seemed puzzled by why I went all the way to Dayton for a WordCamp, when they happen all over the place. Well, there’s not one in Louisiana. In fact, guess who will probably be helping to organize one, one day? You’re looking at her. Dayton was a perfect first WordCamp for me. It wasn’t too big, so I didn’t feel too nervous about speaking.
(That’s a total lie, of course. I was petrified. I had assumed maybe 10 people would come to my talk, but it was more like 25, which filled up the small room.)
In the end, my talk went well, I got lots of great feedback from people, and someone even QUOTED ME in a TWEET during my talk! That was pretty amazing, I have to say.
It's okay to write about today even though you haven't written about Thanksgiving yet! – @pyjammy#wcdayton
Like most people, I have a fear of public speaking. I mean, it’s not the same kind of fear like my one of cockroaches. Cockroaches have a way of sneaking up on you. Or flying in your face. ::shudder:: But public speaking is generally something you have to opt in to.
I submitted a speaker proposal for WordCamp Dayton, thinking, okay, this is a perfect place to get started. There will be friendly faces in the crowd (I don’t just mean people in Ohio are friendly, but also several coworkers will be there) and it won’t be a massively sized one. I have had an idea for a talk ever since we had a public speaking learnup at work last year, so I decided to bite the bullet and just go for it.
And it got accepted and now I have to stand up in front of, I don’t know, at least dozens of people, I guess, and talk about Making Blogging a Habit.
If you’re reading this and you have been blogging for a while, I’d love to hear how you’ve managed to keep it up. Please, I have a speech to write now!
All too soon it was Saturday, our last full day in Barcelona. But as I mentioned before, we stayed up very late the night before (BECAUSE IT WAS MY BIRTHDAY) playing Cards Against Humanity and turning our teeth purple with wine.
There was so much I still wanted to see, but I also knew I needed sleep, so when Beckett woke me up at almost noon, I can’t say I was too upset. And being the take-charge gal she is, she ordered me out of bed so we could go see the city!
Before too long, we’d made our way to Han, the apartment everyone congregated at, and picked up Sandy, and the three of us spent the day exploring the city.
First up, Park Guell. We grabbed a cappuccino from a cafe and hopped on the Metro to the station that looked closest to the park. Once we got there, we were a bit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so we grabbed a taxi, which took us up….and up….and up. Really glad we decided not to walk at this point.
Once at the park, we just wandered around and took in the views. Stunning.
Some castle thingy.
Look! More stairs!
Park Guell
Beckett
Sandy
Me
Park Guell
Performer – hard to see but he’s “sitting” on air.
Spectacular view
Uh, pretty gate.
Sandy captures the view
That’s the view.
SOMEONE (okay, it was me) got us lost in our park wanderings and we ended up outside of it, but we were all hungry (not having eaten anything yet) so we went with it and ended up in a very hilly neighborhood.
We tried to find somewhere to eat, but ended up getting a taxi to the Gothic Quarter instead. We were starving by then, so we went into the first restaurant we saw and basically ordered everything on the menu. So yum.
So. much. food.
We spied a very cultural museum across the way, so decided to check it out.
The tickets were chocolate bars!
Chocolate Olaf
Feels like home.
After that, we wandered the narrow streets and passageways of the Barri Gòtic and did a bit of shopping. I was so glad we got to explore this area.
And then Sandy mentioned he hadn’t seen the Mediterranean yet, so we hopped on the Metro and went to the sea!
Old guys playing some soccer/volleyball game
Random.
Water!
Gorgeous
Getting our feet wet
The rest of the evening was spent losing Beckett’s phone in a taxi, finding my traditional city Starbucks mug souvenir, and having a last dinner with our team. And packing.
And that is the end of the fun part of my trip to Barcelona. Getting home will be another (not terribly exciting but must be recorded for posterity) post…
Okay, so I left off at Wednesday night’s wine explosion…
Thursday was another work day. The main point of this meetup was to set a road map for our team for the next six months. The team I’m on (Hermes) focuses on live chat support for WordPress.com users and support for all users of the WordPress mobile app. Our team (Hermes) was formed in August, and has grown by several members since then, so it was also a bonding experience.
Simon led a bunch of activities that helped us narrow down our goals. At first, I was skeptical – how was writing on post it notes with sharpies (as fun as that is) going to help us form concrete goals? But you know what, it did. Pretty cool.
Don’t we look so profound and thoughtful and stuff? Yeah. We are.
That evening, we split into smaller groups (there were 15 of us all together, not including a few spouses that joined us) for dinner. Yet again, we had a delicious meal. Shocking!
The giant apartment we met in had a chapel.And a a really old foosball table.
We spent most of the day finishing up the road map, had a lovely lunch, and then later, Beckett and I snuck off so we could go see Las Ramblas and get some pre-dinner tapas.
Las Ramblas
Just a little snacky.
Beckett bought me a birthday crown!
We took a team photo before going to eat that night. Everyone on the team was there except our newest member, Mahangu. We got him into the photo, though.
Dinner was amazing, as usual. My coworker Jason spent a lot of time finding a great restaurant that we could all go to together (with 19 of us, it wasn’t easy) but he found a great one in Restaurant Cafeteria 336. We started off with bubbly, and then they just brought out a million small plates, each one more delicious than the next. (My favorite was a concoction of potatoes, tuna, and poached eggs.) I ordered a steak for my main course, and then we had creme brulee for dessert (they call it Creme Catalan, but it’s the same thing.) And of course, the wine was flowing freely.
Dinner menu
Prasath couldn’t handle my birthday fun!
Afterwards, we went back to the apartment (codenamed Han because Harrison Ford had stayed there once, according to the AirBNB listing – I stayed in Lando, and the other place was Chewie) and played Cards Against Humanity while trying to drink all of the wine in Spain. Always fun!
So that marked the end of my birthday, which was fabulous. (Of course, I just mean my birthDAY, not the celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of my birth, which will continue for several weeks to come.)
Since we had stayed up very late Friday night, and Saturday was set aside as a day to explore, I slept until nearly noon. Maaan, that felt good. Since I took a ton of pictures on Saturday, I’ll save those for another post…
I have a lot to recap about Barcelona, so I’m going to break it up a bit.
So of course I was supposed to arrive the afternoon of Monday the 5th, but as we all know, that didn’t happen. I finally arrived Tuesday afternoon, tired but excited.
See how excited I am?
Got to the apartment where everyone was congregating, said my hellos, etc, etc. Not one to waste a moment, fellow Automattician Beckett said, “who wants to go on a gondola ride?” It got dark pretty early there, and I knew if I sat for too long, I’d just fall asleep, so off we went.
The views when we got to the stop were stunning. But we had to take a lot of stairs to get to the top. I mean, a lot. You’d get to the top of a crazy long staircase, only to be confronted with about seventy jillion more steps. My advice – take the bus to the gondola station.
It was getting very close to closing time when we got to the top, so we didn’t get to go in that castle, but maybe next time.
After our gondola adventure, we met up with everyone else for dinner, which was, like pretty much everything we ate here, amazing.
Wednesday was a work day, but the afternoon was devoted to a tour of Sagrada Família. I missed the tour but got some photos of the outside.
Work:
Play:
That evening, we went to dinner at a tapas restaurant where they just kept bringing out food. It was all so, so delicious, and very reasonably priced. At the end, they brought out a porró, which is a wine decanter that you use to pour wine directly into your mouth. Or…not.
Aaaand, I spent the rest of that evening doing laundry.
Yesterday I made the big move back to WordPress.com. This blog has been on a journey. Started off in HTML, a file I’d have to open up every day (I think every month was a separate page back then), write my post, and then re-save.
At some point I moved to another platform, maybe rhymes with Shmogger. But in 2008, I grew up and moved my site to WordPress.com. Yeah, so this isn’t my first rodeo on WordPress.com.
Sometime in 2009 or 2010, I moved to a self-hosted WordPress.org site (wondering what the difference is? This will help.) and have basically maintained that ever since. But working for Automattic and helping out WordPress.com users day in and day out has made me realize the benefits of having my blog back here, so yesterday I moved it back.
Why would I choose WordPress.com over WordPress.org?
Well, a lot of it is to do with community. When I tag a post with, say, “triplets” (which I am wont to do) anyone who looks up that tag in the Reader can find my posts about triplets. Or LASIK. Or whatever I’ve tagged my posts with. And they might start following my blog, and commenting, and becoming part of my blog’s community.
Or suppose I were to write a really excellent post. It might get Freshly Pressed. (I confess, this is a dream of mine.)
And of course, there is the amazing support I’ll now receive as a user of WordPress.com. Look at all those fantastic Happiness Engineers that are now at my beck and call! Heh.
Oh look! There’s me! I’ll just help myself then. 🙂
One year ago today, I became a full time Automattician. I got my picture on this page.
Best. Day. Ever.
My friend Zandy had to convince me, a few months earlier, to apply for a job as a Happiness Engineer. I wasn’t sure if I was technical enough, but I knew I had enough love for WordPress to do it.
It was my Dream Job, with a capital D and a capital J. And I’ve had it for a year now.
This post is part of a series describing what Automatticians do on a daily basis. You can read more posts like this by following the tag #a8cday on WordPress.com and Twitter.
Because we all work remotely, there’s no one typical “day in the life” for an Automattician. But here’s what my day as a Happiness Engineer might look like:
6:07 am: My alarm goes off, playing an old INXS song. What can I say, it makes me feel younger. Like the 13-year-old me who was planning to marry Michael Hutchence.
6:08 am: I hear the boys’ alarm goes off. Theirs plays “Everything is Awesome.” If I woke up to that, I’d hate the song within a week, but it actually seems to make them happy in the mornings, miracle of miracles.
6:15 am: I really get out of bed, for real this time. I join the boys in the living room, where they’re all huddled together on the sofa. Not because they can’t stand to be apart, but because whoever is sitting in the middle is holding the iPad while they watch a Minecraft video on YouTube.
6:45 am: Make my coffee, make sure the boys’ stuff is in their backpacks, get their breakfast ready. (Notice I didn’t say “cook their breakfast.” Making their breakfast entails putting cereal into bags and pouring a cup of milk that they’re supposed to share, but hardly ever touch.) Yell upstairs to the boys to finish getting dressed, brush teeth, put the freaking iPad down, come downstairs, etc.
7:15 am: Carpool arrives! The boys are off to school. Peace and quiet for the next several hours, ahhh…
7:30 am: Another cup of coffee, maybe? Turn on the dishwasher, maybe throw on some laundry.
7:45 am: Take coffee upstairs to my office (which is also the guest room and the boys’ playroom.) Log on to my computer. Check out any messages in Slack that came in overnight. Check email. Open the list of a dozen or so P2s that I like to be caught up on. Some are directly related to work (my team’s P2, for instance) and some are watercooler. (Fitness, kids, random funny stuff, etc.)
My office. Most days.
8:15 am: Log on to Live Chat, which is what I do every day. Chat with users. Chat with my coworkers on Slack. If things are slow, write a blog post, write a P2 post, check out any updates to P2s that I follow. I have a Varidesk so I can work standing or sitting. It’s good to break things up a bit. Still contemplating the treadmill for under the desk. Maybe one day.
Noon: Lunchtime! Log off the live chat system, go downstairs, eat some lunch. Take a few minutes away from the computer. In theory. That would be ideal, but I usually spend lunchtime catching up on Facebook, email, etc. Erm, take a shower if I haven’t already.
12:30 pm-ish: Log back on to live chat. Chat, chat, chat.
2:15 pm: Today’s my day to pick up the carpool of kids from school, but I like to get in some exercise first, so I log off and head to the gym (yes, I took a shower a few hours ago. I’m weird like that, okay?) and then across town to school to pick up a vanload of kids.
4:30 pm: Back home. Husband greeted. Kids given snacks and a very strong suggestion to get their homework done. I log back on for a while, juggling clones and chats.
5:30 pm or so: Log off for the day. Spend time with my family. Make dinner, oversee the homework that wasn’t done earlier, put the boys to bed, all that fun stuff.
10:15 pm: Nighty-night time for me.
So that’s a pretty typical day. I may not have worked a solid eight hours in a row, but there are the days when I don’t have to pick up the kids, so I may work straight from 8:00 to 5:30. I may take an hour in the middle for a bike ride instead of going to the gym. If it’s one of the days I volunteer in the school cafeteria, I may work at Starbucks in the afternoon until it’s time to pick up the kids. There are also days when I train trial Happiness Engineers, and those days obviously look very different. I love the flexibility my job affords me to do these things. I also love talking to our users all day long, and doing everything in my power to make them happy.
If you like the look of my day, we’re hiring! (Don’t worry, the carpools are optional.)
I can’t possibly recap the entire trip, but I’ll write about some of the highlights.
It was incredible, spending time with all of the people I’d been working with over the past year. All these amazing people, finally getting to have a conversation in real life and put a voice to the face. We worked, we learned, and we had a lot of fun. I’ve already posted about some of the things we did.
I gave a talk about how to tell the boys apart (here’s the video.)
A year ago, I had my first day at Automattic. Mind you, it wasn’t my first day as a full-time employee, but it was the first day of my Happiness Engineer trial. A few weeks before, I’d sent in my resume at the urging of a friend, and the intervening days had been filled with checking my email obsessively, hours-long Skype interviews, and hopes that I’d move on to the next step. And here we were, the first day of my trial. I’d spent the previous nine years at a job I didn’t love, but with coworkers I did. It felt weird, not being able to share this huge thing with the people I was so close to. I’d taken off two days from work for the training, and on September 9, 2013, off we went!
It’s impossible to describe how full your brain gets in those two days (and the weeks afterwords.) So much information. As a trial, you’re given almost all of the same rights as a full-time employee, so you’re given immediate access to a vast well of information and people and animated gifs. You have to jump in and swim around and soak it all in and various other aquatic metaphors.
It was an exhilarating but exhausting time. I would come home from my day job, take an hour or so to hang out with the boys and George, and then log in and work on support tickets for four or five hours. George took over all of the parenting in the evenings during this time, and without that support, I never could have made it. I couldn’t sleep well at night, because I’d been staring at a screen all evening. I’d just lie in bed, exhausted, unable to close my eyes. And then when I did finally fall asleep, I’d dream of domain expiration and upgrades and how to set featured images. But I was so happy. So thrilled that I was using my brain at last. And helping people with something I’d always felt passionate about. Blogging! WordPress!
My trial went on for weeks. About three weeks into it, the entire company went to the Grand Meetup in California. It was up to us, a small band of trials, to hold down the fort. It was a Sisyphean task. No matter how many tickets we answered, more came in. Every afternoon, I’d log in, and there were more and more tickets. But we survived, and nearly all of us who worked through the GM got hired.
Next week is this year’s Grand Meetup, in Park City, Utah. There’s a new crop of trials who will be battling the tickets this year. I was leading a training session for them a few weeks back, and I felt like a war veteran, reminiscing and showing off my battle scars.
After seven weeks, I had a chat with my hiring lead, and the words that I’d been dreaming of flashed across my screen. “I’d like to pass you along to your Matt Chat.” The Matt Chat is the final stage of the hiring process, and probably the most nerve-wracking. You basically wait for a Skype ping from the founding developer of WordPress. I’ll admit to a tiny bit of hyperventilating when that “Howdy” popped up one evening. I locked myself in my office and told George I’d see him and the boys in a little while. A few hours later, I emerged from my office with a huge smile on my face. I was officially an Automattician!
Man, that was good times. And in one week, I’ll be attending my first Grand Meetup with most of my 250+ coworkers. This past year has been amazing. I can’t believe this is my life. I work from home, for an amazing company, doing a job that challenges me with incredible people. I get to travelseveraltimes a year. Pinch me!
And if I didn’t frighten you too much, we’re hiring!
Other Automatticians have written about their experiences on trial and working at Automattic:
My site was down off and on all weekend, but I moved hosts from Dreamhost to Bluehost, and after a little tweaking, all should be fine now.
I know this is going to sound like in tooting my own company’s horn, but VaultPress made this whole process immensely easier and less stressful. I just restored a backup from my site to the new host, and voila! There it was! No exporting and importing and themes and plugins and making sure all of my custom CSS was moved. It just…worked. If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, I highly recommend you get VaultPress for it. No, I don’t get a bonus for saying that. Ha ha! I have been wanting to leave Dreamhost for many years because of outages and slowness, but I was dreading the process. No need for that!
Anyway, I’m excited because now my site should load faster now, and things like my site going down right after my boss re-tweets a link to one of my posts to his 68k followers won’t happen again. (It wasn’t because of traffic, it was just a sad coincidence.) (And here’s the post for anyone who couldn’t see it on Saturday.)
pyjammy dot blog 