Work
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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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3–4 minutes
Everyone does support
One of the elements people find really quirky when hearing about Automattic is that everyone starts their job at the company with two weeks of doing support. When you join full-time, you’ll do customer support for WordPress.com for your first two weeks and spend a week in support annually, for evermore, regardless of your position.…
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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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3–5 minutes
Raycast as Alfred alternative
For the last several years, I’ve been using Alfred, a macOS app that allows me to create a more efficient workflow. In an ideal world, I want to create a shortcut for every action that I repeat and that requires me to take more steps than it needs to. It’s not an ideal world because…
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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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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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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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6–10 minutes
Software I use for work
I work for a web development company and that means that all of my work is on the computer. I like exploring new software if it can help me become more efficient in my work. What I look for There are two main elements I look for when deciding on software to use: How well…
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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
Hiking up Table Mountain
Once a year my team at Automattic, called Sirius, meets in person. Last year we went to Mallorca, but this year my team the long travel down to Cape Town. One of our activities was to hike up Table Mountain. Route We took my favourite route up the mountain via Kasteelspoort. We walked to the…
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4–6 minutes
Translating WordPress, and why it matters
Today, I spoke at CMS Africa in Kigali, Rwanda. This was my fourth consecutive attendance. CMS Africa is my favourite conference each year because it brings together a lot of things I like and love; it’s in Africa, it focuses on open source, and it transcends the boundaries of individual CMSs. This year, I chose…
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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…