Tag: work

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.

Alt

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)

I decided to take my meeting with my coach today in our house's new library, which my metamour JTA has recently been working hard on decorating, constructing, and filling with books. The room's not quite finished, but it made for a brilliant space for a bit of quiet reflection and self-growth work.

Alt

Dan, a white man with a ponytail, wearing a black shirt and jeans, sits in a rocking chair in front of an open laptop at a long desk; he has a notebook in his hand and holds a pen near his lips. He's in a domestic library with deep red walls, balanced-arm lamps, a woven rug on a wooden floor, and the wall behind him entirely covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A grassy lawn and sapling trees can be seen through a window, bordered by floral curtains and two clumsily-placed WiFi routers that sit on the window ledge. On the corner of the desk lie various hand tools, suggesting that light construction work has recently taken place.

(Incidentally: I might be treating "lives in a house with a library" as a measure of personal success. Like: this is what winning at life looks like, right? Because whatever else goes wrong, at least you can go hide in the library!)

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"! 😅

Alt

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!'

I have A Plan for today. Step #2 involves a deep-dive into Algolia search indexing, ranking, and priority, to understand how one might optimise for a diverse and complex dataset.

So obviously step #1 involves a big ol' coffee and a sugary breakfast. Here we go...

Alt

A wooden kitchen surface containing a red mug full of freshly-brewed coffee alongside a plate painted with fruits on which sits a heart-shaped doughnut, topped with chocolate and decorated with an iced motif of a sunflower. Beneath the plate, out-of-focus, are the pages of a news periodical.

Back at work after a three-month break, and it turns out the first thing that I'd missed is my team's quirky morning ritual.

Alt

Slack screenshot of Dan saying, at 08:57am: 'You know how many people pika-waved at me on a morning while I was on sabbatical? None. None at all. I missed you guys.' The quote is bookended by an animated GIF of Pikachu waving and another of Pikachu dancing around a heart. Five people have reacted with a mixture of Pikachu dances and waves.