Tag: automattic

Sometimes LinkedIn's approach to anonymising who looks you up isn't very effective.

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'Anonymised' LinkedIn notification advising that 1 hour ago, 'Founder at WordPress viewed your profile'.

I wonder who that could be? 😂

"I know that losing your job was hard," my 8-year-old said to me this evening, "So you can borrow this." He handed me his newest soft toy.

"It'll help you feel better when you're sad. Keep him for the week."

😭

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'Squishmallow' soft toy in the shape of a fat snake with a starry belly, sitting on a grey pillow.

I'm in an extremely rural area and I needed a phone call with my lawyer about my recent redundancy. Phone signal was very bad, so I resolved to climb a nearby hill and call him back.

"I'm at a crossroads," I said, when I finally found enough bars to have a conversation with him.

"In your life?" he asked.

"I guess," I replied, "But also, y'know, literally."

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Pre-Worboys Committee British junction signpost in black and white, photographed against a bright blue sky. The signs point to Rosgill in one direction, Shap and Kendal in a second, and Bampton and Haweswater in a third.

I'm off for a week of full-time volunteering with Three Rings at 3Camp, our annual volunteer hack week: bringing together our distributed team for some intensive in-person time, working to make life better for charities around the world.

And if there's one good thing to come out of me being suddenly and unexpectedly laid-off two days ago, it's that I've got a shiny new laptop to do my voluntary work on (Automattic have said that I can keep it).

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Black Macbook Pro whose screen shows a locally-hosted copy of the Three Rings web application, overlaid with a terminal running lazygit.

With visa complications and travel challenges, this is the very first time that my team - whom I've been working with for the last year - have ever all been in the same country, all at the same time.

You can do a lot in a distributed work environment. But sometimes you just have to come together... in celebration of your achievements, in anticipation of what you'll do next, and in aid of doing those kinds of work that really benefit from a close, communal, same-timezone environment.

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A group of men sit on chairs, a sofa, and the edge of a desk in a comfortable large office space.

Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing...

(with apologies to anybody who doesn't know that in user interface design, a "kebab menu" is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical ellipsis)

Using WordPress internally at Automattic as a productivity tool is great... until you have to call in sick three days in a row and Jetpack treats your "streak" as an "achievement"! 😅

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Two 'Jetpack' notifications on an Android phone, both at 08:07. The first reads: 'Dan Q posted on Marketplace Engineering: AFK for itsdang -26Feb25'. The second reads: 'New achievement: You're on a 3-day streak on Marketplace Engineering!'