Automattic
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1–2 minutes
Barcelona
In March of this year, I went to Barcelona for a work trip. I had been twice before on a youth camp, once as participant and one as leader. It was nice to revisit the city with more freedom (and more money). We stayed in Eixample, just of Rambla de Catalunya. This meant that we…
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1–2 minutes
Getting started with Woo and Paystack
Today, I presented at the Paystack bootcamp in Cape Town and gave an introduction to Woo. Since today is also the day of the rugby world cup finals, and both South Africa and New Zealand sell their fan gear with Woo, I went a bit overboard with rugby references. The scoring Both the Springboks and…
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1–2 minutes
Diversity in speaker line-up: Podcast recommendation
Two weeks ago, I wrote a post on diversity in speaker line-up. Since then, two WordPress community members,Michelle and Allie, have hosted a podcast on this very topic that I would highly recommend listening to: One of the comments Michelle makes shows exactly how complex and contextual talking about diversity is. In the U.S., the…
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1–2 minutes
Vienna
When I was last in Vienna, I watched my first-ever Automattic Town Hall: an online meeting with the whole company. This was a few weeks before Automattic’s acquisition of WooThemes was publicly announced. We also were provided access to our internal tools in that week, and I found a few of my new colleagues on…
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1–2 minutes
New York City
In the last week of September, I had a meetup in New York City. Even though I was there only for about 70 hours, most of which I was hanging out with my colleagues, I wanted to explore this iconic city to the fullest. Given that my time zone is six hours ahead, I decided…
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2–3 minutes
Sabbatical
Today my sabbatical starts. Three months of fully paid leave, a perk every employee at Automattic gets every five years. A few months ago, I was brainstorming with Kim when I last had been on a three-month holiday without any obligations. Given the length of school holidays, I know that it must have been before…
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2–3 minutes
Great leaders have a sense of humour
Our Woo Happy division has grown from 6 to (I think) about 13 leads in less than 2 years. Of the original 6, only 4 are left. That’s resulted in us welcoming many new leads. Next to looking into how to do that (which I wrote about here), it’s prompted me also to regularly think…
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3–4 minutes
First thoughts on Twenty Twenty-Two and Full-Site Editing
WordPress 5.9 was launched a few weeks ago, and I was very eager to test full-site editing on my personal site. I loved the Eksell theme, but the desire to explore this massive change in the WordPress workflows was bigger. Site editing is still in beta, which means that the WordPress core team is busy…
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1–2 minutes
Sorry *if*
This morning, I caught myself typing “Sorry if” on a thread where it was clear that some people in my team didn’t understand what I had intended. I was able to catch myself doing it before I hit the publish button, but I’m definitely not always to prevent myself from using “if” after “sorry”. Blame…
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1–2 minutes
Guest on Do The Woo Podcast
A few months ago, I was a guest on the Do The Woo Podcast talking about some of the challenges and changes we’ve experienced in WooCommerce Happiness and looking at what has worked really well with an organisation that is growing fast. If you’re interested in support, podcasts, or even better, a combination of the…
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7–10 minutes
New lead onboarding
This is a summary of the presentation I gave at the CMS Africa Summit 2021, a virtual event. In the wake of COVID-19, lots of businesses took their stores online. That resulted in a boom for our product, but also one for our support load. One of the ways we addressed this increased influx of…
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1–2 minutes
P2: Distributed communcation
Automattic has been fully distributed since its start in 2005. There are many elements that played a role in being able to do this, but one of the most important ones is P2, a WordPress.com-powered communication tool. Pretty much every team or project has its own P2; a website where rather than CCing everyone on…
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4–6 minutes
“Stepping down” from leadership
Automattic has a fairly flat structure. One of the most evident ways is that there is movement from a team lead position to an individual contributor (IC) without a loss of salary or this being seen as a demotion. What are the advantages? I now have eight team leads reporting to me, with likely quite…
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2–4 minutes
Productivity while working from home
Today, a Belgian tweet caught my eye: The rough idea is that this person keeps postponing the start of the day and, as a result, doesn’t feel productive working from home. In this post, I hope to share some things I’ve learnt over the past years. (Wow, I’ve been a remote worker for more than…
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2–3 minutes
Pee more often!
For quite a while now, I’ve been experiencing some neck and back problems. Both of these are fairly common with people like me who spend the majority of their time behind a computer. I’ve started going to a physiotherapist. Next to the exercises that I was given, here are a few of the other habits…
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1–2 minutes
Orlando
Once a year, Automattic takes a break from the remote life and meets with the whole company in one spot. I took some pics of my amazing colleagues during our week in Orlando, Florida.
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1–2 minutes
Mallorca
Once per year, each individual team at Automattic has a meetup; a time that the whole team is in the same physical space. My team – Sirius – is entirely based in Europe and Africa, so we went for our meetup in the same time zone and settled on Mallorca. We stayed at the stunning…
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2–3 minutes
WooCommerce 3.3 and my 50th commit 🎉
WooCommerce 3.3 launched yesterday. Since June 2015, I’ve been listed as a contributor for every major and minor release. I’m not going to lie; it’s a pretty sweet feeling to know that something you wrote a few lines of, is being used on over 2 million webshops. GitHub is (not that) scary When I joined…
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1–2 minutes
Amsterdam
I’m not going to lie, when it was first announced that team leads at Automattic were expected to attend leadership training at some point, I was a bit hesitant. I had been already travelled to five countries for work last year and with travel times being at least twelve hours in any direction from Cape…
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4–6 minutes
Introduction to Sass
In a previous post, I’ve introduced using Sass through the WordPress Customiser and Jetpack. In this post, I want to quickly explain what exactly Sass is and where to get started. Sass stands for “Syntactically awesome style sheets”, and is basically CSS with superpowers — or “CSS on crystal meth” as I described it in one…