My work colleagues from around the world have gathered for a meeting at a hotel near here. I woke a little early this morning and so I decided to come out and try to find a couple of
geocaches before our team meeting starts.
After failing to find nearby GCA7Q4A “Elephant Parade” owing to construction work, I was hopeful of a find here.
The coordinates put me exactly on top of a likely hiding place, and with a little exploration (and some pretending to tie my shoes!) I had the cache in my hand. SL, TFTC.
Listened for water pumping but couldn’t hear any over the traffic noise, I’m afraid! Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.
As you can see, a lot of serious work has been taking place.
When we’ve not been out tackling escape rooms, finding geocaches, and eating curry, we’ve been doing a variety of
activities to help solidify our new team’s goals, priorities, and expertise: y’know, the normal things you might expect on a company away week.
I volunteered to lead the initial session on our first day with a couple of icebreaker games, which went well enough that I’m inclined to share them here in case they’re of any use to
you. The games we played are called Heraldry and Compairs. Let’s take a look:
One of my teammates was unable to get his visa cleared and had to attend remotely1, which resulted in me making a late change to my planned
icebreaker activities to ensure they were presence-agnostic.
Heraldry
I was looking at the coat of arms of Noord Holland, the province in which Amsterdam lies, and thinking about all the symbolism and propaganda that’s encoded into traditional heraldry,
and how much effort it takes to decode it… unless you just, y’know, guess!
Per pale or and azure; I a lion rampant gules, armed and langued azure, II seme of horizontally placed billets or, two lions passant guardant in pale of the same. The shield is
crested by a coronet of five leaves or.
2
I asked each participant to divide a shield into five quadrants and draw their own coats of arms, featuring aspects of (a) their work life, (b) their personal life, (c) something they
value, (d) something they’re good at, and (e) something surprising or unusual. I really wanted to keep the time pressure on and not allow anybody to overthink things, so I set a
5-minute timer from the moment everybody had finished drawing their shield outline.
Then, everybody passed their drawing to the right, and each person in turn tried, as best they could, to introduce the person to their left by attempting to interpret their
neighbour’s drawing. The known categories helped to make it easier by helping people latch onto something to start talking about, but also more-challenging as people second-guessed
themselves (“no, wait, maybe it’s sailing you’re good at and guitar you play in your personal life?”).
This wasn’t about artistic skills; it was about getting people to talk to one another. Which is for the best, given my (lack of) artistic skills.
After each introduction is made, the person being introduced gets to explain their heraldry for themselves, congratulating their introducer on the things they got right and their
close-guesses along the way.
It’s sort-of halfway between “introduce your neighbour” and “pictionary”. And it worked well to get us warmed-up, feeling a little silly, knowing one another slightly better, and in a
space in which everybody had been expected to have spoken and to have made a harmless mistake (everybody managed to partially-interpret a shield correctly). A
useful place to be at the end of an icebreaker exercise is left with the reminder that we are, after all, only human.
Compairs
Next up, we played a game only slightly inspired by witnessing a game of Mr and Mrs the other week3.
I threw together a Perchance (which, in the nature of such things, is entirely open-source and you’re welcome to adapt it for
your own use) that generated a series of randomly-selected pairs of teammates and asked a question to differentiate the two of them.
Some of the questions were gentle, but solicited a reasonable amount of guesswork alongside a modest amount of deduction.
Participants other than the two shown on the screen were challenged to guess the answer to the question. Sometimes the questions would have a definitive answer, and sometimes
not: the joy was in the speculation! “Hmm, I know that Dan’s done quite a bit of globetrotting… but could he actually have travelled further East than a colleague who lives much
further East than him?”
After a few seconds to a minute, once their colleagues had settled on an answer, the people listed on the question were encouraged to make their own guesses. Usually they’ll have a
better idea as they are one of the data points, but that’s not always true!
A handful of questions were even tangentially work-related. Who is the accessibility Web expert in our team, anyway?
There’s no points, and you can play for as long as you like so long as it’s long enough that everybody gets at least one turn, so it’s a good “fill the rest of the time slot” game. It
follows Heraldry moderately well as an icebreaker double-feature because the former is firstly about learning things about one another (and to a lesser extent guessing), and
the latter is about the opposite.
I came out of both games knowing more about the humans behind the screens in my new team, and it seemed to open up the room for some good discussions afterwards, so the social lubricant
effect was clearly effective too. If you give them a go or adapt them into anything else, let me know!
Footnotes
1 Our absent colleague instead had to tower over us on an enormous projector screen.
2 The red (“gules”) upright (“rampant”) lion in the coat of arms possibly comes from the
heraldry of the city of Gelderen in Germany, but once part of the Dutch Republic. The lions striding (“passant”) to the left (“to dexter”) but turning to face you (“guardant”) come
from the arms of Fryslân (Friesland), and its rectangles represent the districts of Fryslân. Aren’t you glad you asked.
3 Also known as The Newlyweds Game after the US game show of that name and basically the same format, Mr and Mrs is a game in which a (typically newly) married couple are asked questions about one
another and their lives together which they answer separately and then those answers are compared. This induces a reaction of compersion when they’re “right” and in-sync and when the
couple disagree it results in amusement. Or possibly divorce.
I’ve recently changed team at work, so my new team and I have gotten together – from the UK, France, Poland, India and South Africa – here in Amsterdam to meet up in person and do some work “together” for a change: normally we work entirely
distributed. After our day of work we did an escape room together, then on our way to dinner I dragged them out of their way a bit to find this geocache.
Quick easy find, TFTC! Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK (and from many other corners of the
world, courtesy of Team Desire from Automattic!).
Even on a Monday morning the muggles are lining up to hold the trolley. Not me. As an actual magician, I’ve no
need for such frivolities. Instead, as I’m passing anyway on my way to a train to an entirely different magical land (The Netherlands), I just snapped a selfie with the sign visible in
the background. Easy peasy. TFTC.
QEF while out hunting for some breakfast this morning between trains on my journey from Oxford to Amsterdam for a work meetup. Lovely thematic cache container in a great spot. FP awarded. TFTC.
1 This being my 100th post relies on you using non-pedant counting, that is: allowing
“checkins” like this to count as fully-fledged blog posts. There’s more thought given to
this question in my blog post about Kev Quirk’s #100DaysToOffload challenge, but the short answer seems to be that the challenge’s
creator would count this as my 100th post of the year, so perhaps you should too. If you don’t, though, then I’ve so-far published 74 posts this year and – thanks to Bloganuary and a general renewed focus on blogging I’m probably still on-track to make 100. And if I remember to
do so I’ll post a footnote for you pedants when I do.
This winter, though, Fire became underpopulated. We lost a few folks to a newly-formed Experiments team, and several individual team members moved to other parts of the company. Once we
got small enough it wasn’t worthwhile being a team in our own right. Our focus areas got split between Desire and Masume, and those of us who were left got absorbed into Team Desire.
That’s where you’ll now find me.
I miss being “on Fire”, because it sounded cool. Maybe I should suggest a patch for our intranet to allow teams to choose the preposition used when referring to their members, e.g.
from “on”, “in”, “of” etc. Then I could be the “Code Magician of Desire”, which is a cool job title once again.
I was initially a bit bummed about the dissolution of my old team3
and struggled to find my place in my new team. The work is similar and the codebases overlap, but even sibling teams can have different rituals and approaches to problems that provide a
learning barrier4.
I think I’ve begun to find my feet now, and next week I’m excited to meet many of my new team in-person for the first time at a Desire-wide meetup in Amsterdam5.
Footnotes
1 Strangely, this isn’t directly related to Automattic’s recent re-organisation, which I’ve written about previously, but is a
result of more-local changes within my division coupled with the natural flow of Automatticians around the company. But it does make it feel from my perspective like a lot of things
are getting jiggled about simultaneously!
2 When Alpha were first discussing the upcoming split, I suggested that we might like to
give our new teams a “pair” of names that linked to one another, and threw out a few ideas to get the ball rolling. One of those ideas was “Fuel and Fire”; I jokingly added that “it
was like the Metallica song, which also gave us ‘Desire’ as a possible third team name should the need arise”. This wasn’t
supposed to be taken seriously, but apparently it was taken seriously enough because my suggestion was the winner and I soon ended up “on Fire”.
3 Many of my old teammates and I did at least manage to get together for one final
(virtual) social event, culminating in a symbolic “extinguishing of fire” as a candle that had been left burning through the meeting was put out at the end.
4 A team’s rituals aren’t just about the way they hold their meetings or run their retros;
for example my new team are very disciplined about announcing their appearance on a morning with a friendly greeting in our social channel, which are for some reason generally
responded-to with a barrage of “waving Pikachu” slackmoji. I don’t know why Pikachu is the mascot of our mornings, but I’ve joined in because it’s a fun gesture of the team’s distinct
collective personality. Also it’s a cute GIF: it’s nice to get waved-at by Pikachu on a morning.
5 Doubly-awesome, the destination’s proximity means that I get to travel by Eurostar
rather than having to fly.
In August, I celebrated my blog – with its homepage weighing-in at a total of just 481kb – being admitted to Kev Quirk‘s 512kb club. 512kb club celebrates websites (often personal sites) whose homepage are neither “ultra minimal”
or “link pages” but have a total size, including all assets, of under half a megabyte. It’s about making a commitment to a leaner, more-efficient Web.
My relatively-heavyweight homepage only just slipped in under the line. But, feeling inspired perhaps by some performance enhancements I’ve been planning this week at work, I
decided to try to shave a little more off:
Now, at ~234kb, danq.me just beats the excellent gomakethings.com (it’s all those heavyweight fonts, Chris!).
Here’s what I changed:
The “recent article” tiles are dynamically sized based on their number, type, and the visitor’s screen resolution. But apart from the top one they’re almost never very large. Using
thumbnail images for the non-first tile shaved off almost 160kb.
You can see the difference, but it’s still acceptable to look at, I think.
Not space-saving, but while I was in there I ensured that the first tile’s image – which almost-certainly comprises part of the Largest
Contentful Paint – is never delivered with loading="lazy".
I was providing a shortcut icon in .ico format (<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/_q23t/icons/favicon-16-32-48-64-128.ico" />), which is pretty
redundant nowadays because all modern browsers (and even IE11) support
.png icons. I was already providing.png and .svg versions, but it turns out that some browsers favour the one with the (harmful?) rel="shortcut icon" over rel="icon" if both are present, and .ico files are –
being based on Windows Bitmaps – horrendously inefficient.
By getting under the 250kb threshold, I’ve jumped up a league from Blue Team to Orange Team, so that’s nice too. I can’t see a meaningful
path from where I’m at to Green Team (under 100kb) though, so this level might have to suffice.
Yesterday, I wrote the stupidest bit of CSS of my entire career.
Two new visual elements and one textual one will make it clear where a product’s placement in the marketplace is sponsored.
Owners of online shops powered by WooCommerce can optionally “connect” their stores back to Woo.com. This enables them to manage their subscriptions to
any extensions they use to enhance their store1. They can also browse a
marketplace of additional extensions they might like to consider, which is somewhat-tailored to them based on e.g. their geographical location2
In the future, we’ll be adding sponsored products to the marketplace listing, but we want to be transparent about it so yesterday I was working on some code that would determine from
the appropriate API whether an extension was sponsored and then style it differently to make this clear. I took
a look at the proposal from the designer attached to the project, which called for
the word “Sponsored” to appear alongside the name of the extension’s developer,
a stripe at the top in the brand colour of the extension, and
a strange green blob alongside it
That third thing seemed like an odd choice, but I figured that probably I just didn’t have the design or marketing expertise to understand it, and I diligently wrote some appropriate code.3
I even attached to my PR a video demonstrating how my code reviewers could test it without spoofing actual sponsored
extensions.
After some minor tweaks, my change was approved. The designer even swung by and gave it a thumbs-up. All I needed to do was wait for the automated end-to-end tests to complete, and I’d
be able to add it to WooCommerce ready to be included in the next-but-one release. Nice.
In the meantime, I got started on my next bit of work. This one also included some design work by the same designer, and wouldn’t you know it… this one also had a little green
blob on it?
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that my first thought was that this must be part of some wider design strategy to put little green blobs everywhere.
Then it hit me. The blobs weren’t part of the design at all, but the designer’s way of saying “look at this bit, it’s important!”. Whoops!
So I got to rush over to my (already-approved, somehow!) changeset and rip out
the offending CSS: the stupidest bit of CSS of my entire career.
Not bad code per se, but reasonable code resulting from a damn-stupid misinterpretation of a designer’s wishes. Brilliant.
3 A fun side-effect of working on open-source software is that my silly mistake gets
immortalised somewhere where you can go and see it any time you like!
Has anyone informed work/colleagues about being ENM and how was it received?
I’ve informed a few colleagues but I am considering informing my team as part of my Team Champion and EDI role.
…
I’ve been “out” at every one of the employers1 since I entered into my first open/nonmonogamous
relationship a couple of decades ago.
I didn’t do so immediately: in fact, I waited almost until the point that coming out was an academic necessity! The point at which it was only a matter of time before somebody thought they’d
caught us “cheating”… or else because I didn’t want to have to lie to coworkers about e.g. from whom a romantic gift might have
come.
I guess I’ll squeeze in “come out to colleagues” in between the project planning meeting and working on rolling out the server upgrades.
Here’s how it went to be “out” at each of the three full-time jobs I’ve held over that period:
We lived and worked in and around a small town, and in our small tight-knit team we all had a reasonable handle on what was going on in one another’s personal lives. By the time I was
actively in a relationship with Ruth (while still in a relationship with Claire, whom all my coworkers had met at e.g. office parties and the
like), it just seemed prudent to mention it, as well as being honest and transparent.
This photograph – featuring some of my coworkers – was taken in 2005. At that point, they probably all thought of me as a regular, normal person. At least, as far as my relationship
structure was concerned. Not in any other way. Obviously.
It went fine. And it made Monday watercooler conversations about “who what I did at the weekend” simpler. Being a small team sharing a single open-plan office meant that I
was able to mention my relationship status to literally the entire company at once, and everybody took it with a shrug of noncommittal acceptance.
The Bodleian Libraries was a much bigger beast, and in turn a part of the massive University of Oxford. It was big enough to have a “LGBT+ Staff”
network within its Equality and Diversity unit, within which – because of cultural intersections2
– I was able to meet a handful of other poly folk at the University.
This motley crew were exactly as warm and accepting a bunch as you could ask for.
I mentioned very early on – as soon as it came up organically – the structure of the relationship I was in, and everybody was cool (or failing that, at least professional) about it.
Curious coworkers asked carefully-crafted questions, and before long (and following my lead) my curious lifestyle choices were as valid a topic for light-hearted jokes as anything else
in that fun and gossipy office.
And again: it paid-off pragmatically, especially when I took parental leave after the birth of each of our two kids3.
It also helped defuse a situation when I was spotted by a more-distant coworker on my way back from a lunchtime date with a lover who wasn’t Ruth, and my confused colleague
introduced herself to the woman that she assumed must’ve been the partner she’d heard about. When I explained that no, this is a different person I’m seeing my
colleague seemed taken aback, and I was glad to be able to call on a passing coworker who knew me better to back me up in my assertion that no, this wasn’t just me trying to lie to
cover some illicit work affair! Work allies are useful.
I’ve been with Automattic for four and a half years now, and this time around I went one step further in telling potential teammates about my relationship structure by mentioning it in
my “Howdymattic” video – a video introduction new starters are encouraged to record to say hi to the rest of the company4.
Some full-on MSPaint grade titling made it into that video, didn’t it?
A convenient side-effect of this early coming-out was that I found myself immediately inducted into the “polymatticians” group – a minor diversity group within Automattic, comprising a
massive 1.2% of the company, who openly identify as engaging in nonmonogamous relationships5!
That was eye-opening. Not only does Automattic have a stack of the regular inclusivity groups you might expect from a big tech company (queer, Black, women, trans,
neurodiverse) and a handful of the less-common ones (over-40s, cancer survivors, nondrinkers, veterans), they’ve also got a private group for those of us who happen to be both
Automatticians and in (or inclined towards) polyamorous relationships. Mind blown.
My relationship structure’s been… quietly and professionally accepted. It doesn’t really come up (why would it? in a distributed company it has even less-impact on anything than it did
in my previous non-distributed roles)… outside of the “polymatticians” private space.
In summary: I can recommend being “out” at work. So long as you’d feel professionally safe to do so: relationship structure isn’t necessarily a protected characteristic
(it’s complicated), and even if it were you might be careful about mentioning it in some environments. It’s great to have the transparency to not have to watch your words when a
coworker asks about “your partner”. Plus being free to be emotionally honest at work is just good for your mental wellbeing, in my opinion! If you trust your coworkers, be honest with
them. If you don’t… perhaps you need to start looking for a better job?
Footnotes
1 I’m not counting my freelance work during any of those periods, although I’ve been
pretty transparent with them too.
2 Let’s be clear: most queer folks, just like most straight folks, seem to be
similarly-inclined towards monogamy. But ethnical non-monogamy in various forms seems to represent a larger minority within queer communities than outside them. There’s all kinds of
possible reasons for this, and smarter people than me have written about them, but personally I’m of the opinion that, for many, it stems from the fact that by the time you’re
societally-forced to critically examine your relationships, you might as well go the extra mile and decide whether your relationship structure is right for you too. In other
words: I suspect that cis hetro folks would probably have a proportional parity of polyamory if they weren’t saturated with media and cultural role models that show them what their
relationship “should” look like.
3 Unwilling to lie, I made absolutely clear that I was neither the father of either of
them nor the husband of their mother (among other reasons, the law prohibits Ruth from marrying me on account of being married to JTA), but pointed out that my contract merely stipulated that I was the partner of a birth parent, which was something I’d made completely
clear since I first started working there. I’m not sure if I was just rubber-stamped through the University’s leave process as a matter of course or if they took a deeper look at me
and figured “yeah, we’re not going to risk picking a legal fight with that guy”, but I got my leave granted.
4 If you enjoyed my “Howdymattic”, you’ll probably also love the outtakes.
My employer Automattic‘s having a bit of a reorganisation. For unrelated reasons, this
coincides with my superteam having a bit of a reorganisation, too, and I’m going to be on a different team next week than I’ve been on for most of the 4+ years I’ve been
there1.
Together, these factors mean that I have even less idea than usual what I do for a living, right now.
What is it I do here again? Something something code WooCommerce something something marketplace awesome something, right?
On the whole, I approve of Matt‘s vision for this reorganisation. He writes:
Each [Automattic employee] gets a card: Be the Host, Help the Host, or Neutral.
You cannot change cards during the course of your day or week. If you do not feel aligned with your card, you need to change divisions within Automattic.
“Be the Host” folks are all about making Automattic’s web hosting offerings the best they possibly can be. These are the teams behind WordPress.com,
VIP, and Tumblr, for example. They’re making us competitive on the global stage. They bring Automattic money in a
very direct way, by making our (world class) hosting services available to our customers.
“Help the Host” folks (like me) are in roles that are committed to providing the best tools that can be used anywhere. You might run your copy of Woo, Jetpack, or (the client-side bit of) Akismet on Automattic infrastructure… or
alternatively you might be hosted by one of our competitors or even on your own hardware. What we bring to Automattic is more ethereal: we keep the best talent and expertise in these
technologies close to home, but we’re agnostic about who makes money out of what we create.
This stock photo confuses me so much that I had to use it. It’s WordPress, as seen in Chrome on Windows Vista… but running on a MacBook Air. The photographer has tried to blur their
site domain name (but it’s perfectly readable), but hasn’t concealed the fact they’re running µTorrent in the background (for Obviously Legal Reasons, I’m sure). Weird. But the
important thing is that, crazy as this person’s choices are, they can use Automattic’s software however they like. It’s cool.
Anyway: I love the clarification on the overall direction of the company… but I’m not sure how we market it effectively2. I look around at the people in my team and its sister
teams, all of us proudly holding our “Help the Hosts” cards and ready to work to continue to make Woo an amazing ecommerce platform wherever you choose to host it.
And obviously I can see the consumer value in that. It’s reassuring to know that the open source software we maintain or contribute to is the real deal and we’re not exporting a
cut-down version nor are we going to try to do some kind of rug pull to coerce people into hosting with us. I think Automattic’s long track record shows that.
But how do we sell that? How do we explain that “hey, you can trust us to keep these separate goals separate within our company, so there’s never a conflict
of interest and you getting the best from us is always what we want”? Personally, seeing the inside of Automattic, I’m convinced that we’re not – like so much of Big Tech –
going to axe the things you depend upon3
or change the terms and conditions to the most-exploitative we can get away with4 or support your business just long enough to be able to undermine and consume it 5.
In short: I know that we’re the “good guys”. And I can see how this reorganisation reinforces that. But I can’t for the life of me see how we persuade the rest of the world of the
fact6.
Any ideas?
Footnotes
1 I’ve been on Team Fire for a long while, which made my job title “Code Magician on Fire”, but now I’ll be on Team Desire which isn’t half as catchy a name but
I’m sure they’ll make up for it by being the kinds of awesome human beings I’ve become accustomed to working alongside at Automattic.
2 Fortunately they pay me to code, not to do marketing.
6 Seriously, it’s a good thing I’m not in marketing. I’d be so terrible at it. Also public
relations. Did I ever tell you the story about the time that, as a result of a mix-up, I accidentally almost gave an interview to the Press Office at the Vatican? A story for another
time, perhaps
It feels like a bit of a cop-out to say I’m already doing it, but that’s true. Well, mostly (read on and I’ll make a counterpoint!).
Automattic
Getting to hang out with my awesome teammates in various locations around the globe is a plus.
I’m incredibly fortunate that my job gets to tick so many of the boxes I’d put on a “dream job wishlist”:
I work on things that really matter. Automattic’s products make Web publishing and eCommerce available to the world without “lock-in” or proprietary bullshit. I
genuinely believe that Automattic’s work helps to democratise the Internet and acts, in a small way, as a counterbalance to the dominance of the big social media silos.
I get to make the world a better place by giving away as much intellectual property as possible. Automattic’s internal policy is basically “you don’t have
to ask to open source something; give away anything you like so long as it’s not the passwords”.1 Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation, and all that.
We work in a distributed, asynchronous way. I work from where I want, when I want. I’m given the autonomy to understand what my ideal working environment is and
make the most of it. Some mornings I’m just not feeling that coding flow, so I cycle somewhere different and try working the afternoon in a different location. Some weekends I’m struck
by inspiration and fire up my work laptop to make the most of it, because, y’know, I’m working on things that really matter and I care about them.
I work with amazing people who I learn from and inspire me. Automattic’s home to some incredibly talented people and I love that I’ve managed to find a place that
actively pushes me to study new things every day.
Automattic’s commitment to diversity & inclusion is very good-to-excellent. As well as getting work work alongside people from a hundred different countries and
with amazingly different backgrounds, I love that I get to work in one of the queerest and most queer-affirming environments I’ve ever been paid to be in.
I don’t know how I managed to select a photo of my fun-loving kickass volunteers that’s somehow more dry and corporate than the photo of my work colleagues above.
But you know where else ticks all of those boxes? My voluntary work with Three Rings. Let me talk you through that wishlist again:
I work on things that really matter. We produce the longest-running volunteer management system in the world3
We produce it as volunteers ourselves, because we believe that volunteering matters and we want to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to do as much good
as possible, and this allows us to give it away as cheaply as possible: for free, to the smallest and poorest charities.
I get to make the world a better place by facilitating the work of suicide helplines, citizens advice bureaus, child support services, environmental charities,
community libraries and similar enterprises, museums, theatres, charity fundraisers, and so many more good works. Back when I used to to helpline volunteering I might do a three
hour shift and help one or two people, and I was… okay at it. Now I get to spend those three hours making tools that facilitate many tens of thousands of volunteers to provide
services that benefit an even greater number of people across six countries.
We work in a distributed, asynchronous way. Mostly I work from home; sometimes we get together and do things as a team (like in the photo above). Either way, I’m
trusted with the autonomy to produce awesome things in the way that works best for me, backed with the help and support of a team that care with all their hearts about what we do.
I work with amazing people who I learn from and inspire me. I mentioned one of them yesterday. But seriously, I could
sing the praises of any one of our two-dozen strong team, whether for their commitment to our goals, their dedication to making the world better, their passion for quality and
improvement, their focus when producing things that meet our goals, or their commitment to sticking with us for years or decades, without pay, simply because they know that
what we do is important and necessary for so many worthy causes. And my fellow development/devops volunteers continue to introduce me to new things, which scratches my “drive-to-learn”
itch.
Three Rings’ commitment to diversity & inclusion is very good, and improving. We skew slightly queer and have moderately-diverse gender mix, but I’m especially
impressed with our age range these days: there’s at least 50 years between our oldest and youngest volunteers with a reasonably-even spread throughout, which is super cool (and the kind
of thing many voluntary organisations dream of!).
The difference
The biggest difference between these two amazing things I get to work on is… only one of them pays me. It’s hard to disregard that.
Sometimes at Automattic, I have to work on something that’s not my favourite project in the world. Or the company’s priorities clash with my own, and I end up implementing something
that my gut tells me isn’t the best use of my time from a “make the world a better place” perspective. Occasionally they take a punt on something that really pisses me off.
That’s all okay, of course, because they pay me, and I have a mortgage to settle. That’s fine. That’s part of the deal.
My voluntary work at Three Rings is more… mine. I’m the founder of the project; I 100% believe in what it’s trying to achieve. Even though I’ve worked to undermine the power of
my “founder privilege” by entrusting the organisation to a board and exec that I know will push back and challenge me, I feel safe fully trusting that everything I give to Three Rings
will be used in the spirit of the original mission. And even though I might sometimes disagree with others on the best way forward, I accept that whatever decision is made comes from a
stronger backing than if I’d acted alone.
Three Rings, of course, doesn’t pay me4. That’s why I can only
give them a few hours a week of my time. If I could give more, I would, but I have bills to pay so my “day job” is important too: I’m just so incredibly fortunate that that “day job”
touches upon many of the same drives that are similarly satisfied by my voluntary work.
If I didn’t have bills to pay, I could happily just volunteer for Three Rings. I’d miss Automattic, of course: there are some amazing folks there whom I love very much,
and I love the work. But if they paid me as little as Three Rings did – that is, nothing! – I’d choose Three Rings in a heartbeat.
But man, what a privileged position I’m in that I can be asked what my dream job is and I can answer “well, it’s either this thing that I already do, or this other thing that I already
do, depending on whether this hypothetical scenario considers money to be a relevant factor.” I’m a lucky, lucky man.
Footnotes
1 I’m badly-paraphrasing Matt, but you get the gist.
2 Automattic’s not hiring as actively nor voraciously as it has been for the last few
years – a recent downtown in the tech sector which you may have seen have heavily affected many tech companies has flooded the market with talent, and we’ve managed to take our fill
of them – we’re still always interested to hear from people who believe in what we do and have skills that we can make use of. And because we’re a community with a lot of
bloggers, you can find plenty of first-hand experiences of our culture online if you’d like to solicit some opinions before you apply…
3 Disclaimer: Three Rings is the oldest still-running volunteer management system
we’re aware of: our nearest surviving “competitor”, which provides similar-but-different features for a price that’s an order of magnitude greater, launched later in the same year we
started. But maybe somebody else has been running these last 22 years that we haven’t noticed, yet: you never know!
4 Assuming you don’t count a Christmas dinner each January – yes, really! (it turns out to
be cheaper to celebrate Christmas in January) – as payment.
There’s a perception that a blog is a long-lived, ongoing thing. That it lives with and alongside its author.1
But that doesn’t have to be true, and I think a lot of people could benefit from “short-term” blogging. Consider:
Photoblogging your holiday, rather than posting snaps to social media
You gain the ability to add context, crosslinking, and have permanent addresses (rather than losing eveything to the depths of a feed). You can crosspost/syndicate to your favourite
socials if that’s your poison..
Photoblog your holiday and I might follow it, and I’ll do so at my convenience. Put your snaps on Facebook and I almost certainly won’t bother. Photo courtesy ArtHouse Studio.
Blogging your studies, rather than keeping your notes to yourself
Writing what you learn helps you remember it; writing what you learn in a public space helps others learn too and makes it easy to search for your discoveries later.2
Recording your roleplaying, rather than just summarising each session to your fellow players
My D&D group does this at levellers.blog! That site won’t continue to be updated forever – the party will someday retire or, more-likely, come to a glorious but horrific end – but
it’ll always live on as a reminder of what we achieved.
One of my favourite examples of such a blog was 52 Reflect3 (now integrated into its successor The Improbable Blog). For 52 consecutive weeks my partner‘s brother Robin
blogged about adventures that took him out of his home in London and it was amazing. The project’s finished, but a blog was absolutely the right medium for it because now it’s got a
“forever home” on the Web (imagine if he’d posted instead to Twitter, only for that platform to turn into a flaming turd).
I don’t often shill for my employer, but I genuinely believe that the free tier on WordPress.com is an excellent
way to give a forever home to your short-term blog4.
Did you know that you can type new.blog (or blog.new; both work!) into your browser to start one?
What are you going to write about?
Footnotes
1This blog is, of course, an example of a long-term blog. It’s been going in
some form or another for over half my life, and I don’t see that changing. But it’s not the only kind of blog.
2 Personally, I really love the serendipity of asking a web search engine for the solution
to a problem and finding a result that turns out to be something that I myself wrote, long ago!
4 One of my favourite features of WordPress.com is the fact that it’s built atop the
world’s most-popular blogging software and you can export all your data at any time, so there’s absolutely no lock-in: if you want to migrate to a competitor or even host your own
blog, it’s really easy to do so!
Among the many perks of working for a company with a history so tightly-intertwined with that of the open-source WordPress project is that license to attend WordCamps – the biggest WordPress conferences – is basically a
given.
It’s frankly a wonder that this is, somehow, my first WordCamp. As well as using it1 and developing atop
it2,
of course, I’ve been contributing to WordPress since 2004 (albeit only in a tiny way, and not at all for most of the last decade!).
If you already know what WP-CLI is… let’s be friends.
Today is Contributor Day, a pre-conference day in which folks new and old get together in person to hack on WordPress and WordPress-adjacent projects. So I met up with Cem, my Level 4 Dragonslayer friend, and we took an ultra-brief induction into WP-CLI3
before diving in to try to help write some code.
Contributor Days are about many things, but perhaps their biggest value comes from lowering the barrier to becoming a new contributor to an open-source project by sitting you
right next to somebody who already knows it well.
So today, as well as meeting some awesome folks, I got to write an overly-verbose justification for a
bug report being invalid and implement my first PR for WP-CLI: a bugfix for a strange quirk in output formatting.
The bug I fixed is slightly hard to describe (and even harder to explain why it matters), but here’s a summary: when you run a WP-CLI command that first displays a table and
then the result, the result is likely to always appear in colour even if you specify --no-color.
I hope to be able to continue contributing to WP-CLI. I learned a lot about it today, and while I don’t use it as much as I used to in my multisite-management days, I still really
respect its power as a tool.
Did I mention lately how awesome my employers are? I promise my blog’s not always gonna be me shilling for them… but today it is.
Footnotes
1 Even with the monumental stack of custom code woven into DanQ.me, a keen eye will
probably spot that it’s WordPress-powered.
3 WP-CLI is… it’s like Drush but for WordPress, if that makes sense to you? If not: it’s a
multifaceted command-line tool for installing, configuring, maintaining, and managing WordPress installations, and I’ve been in love with it for years.
