Automattic
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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
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1–2 minutes
Whistler
Just like last year, we had our annual company meetup in Whistler, Canada. I wanted to travel light, so I only took my 50mm lens, but I luckily was able to borrow a wide-angle lens from one of my colleagues for the night photography. And this year again, I saw a black bear. Unfortunately, this year’s
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1–2 minutes
The Quest for 666
Every year at the Grand Meetup, when our whole company gathers in the same physical space, we give flash talks: 4-minute talks about any topic. Two months before the 2016 Grand Meetup, we sat in an Ethiopian restaurant in Berlin with a few of the WooCommerce team and we chatted about all sorts of things,
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1–2 minutes
Getting Sassy with WordPress 4.7 and Jetpack
I’m not a WordPress developer, I’m a WordPress site builder. I don’t develop the blocks to create a website, I use those that others have created. Those blocks are themes and plugins. Tweaking designs However, the styling and design will not always look exactly like you want. You’re happy with the majority of it, but
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2–4 minutes
WordPress: A 💖 Story
Below is a summary of my keynote at CMS Africa Summit 2017, a community summit in Africa. I love working with WordPress. I’m not a web developer, but I’ve tried a lot of different solutions for making websites. My first proper site was built with Flash, and though it was cool back then to have