As a designer at Automattic, you’re responsible for making sure the amazing things our engineers can create are both easy to use and easy on the eyes. Rather than churning out design after design for a multitude of clients, you’ll focus intensely on every aspect of the design of a product — from the way we advertise and market the service to the smallest details of its user interface. You’re designing for the web, yes, but you’re doing so with an old-school dedication to simplicity and clarity.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15TP8QvtG9M] Toni on the present and future of online publishing, WordPress.org and .com, online identify and more. Shot at the O’Reilly 2010 Web 2.0 Summit.
Heather Gold is the love child of Sarah Silverman and Rachel Maddow and tours North America as a comedian, speaker, and solo performer.
This all sounds great to me. Going to have to look this up when in San Francisco. Although I do have easy access to advice from great speakers like Matt and Scott if I want to through Automattic, such a workshop is sure to facilitate things.
This weekend being Canadian Thanks Giving, I thought I’d list a few of the many things I am thankful for this year:
My family: I have a wonderful wife and three fantastic little boys who all bring light to my life and I love them to death.
My friends: I haven’t always been the most social person, but I’ve been trying to make a lot of efforts in the last few years, which has translated in a much saner social life.
My job: The last year at Automattic has by far been the best of my career and I’m thinking the upcoming one will be even better. Yay!
My health: so far so very good. All is well in Stephane-land, and will hopefully stay on this track.
My city/province/country: I live in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Need I say more? 🙂
Hoping you all have as much to be thankful for, and wishing you a happy Thanks Giving.
I find it to be not only elegant in its simplicity, but also brilliant when it come to learning curve and flexibility. Why? Simple: all in all, it’s just a set of clever shell scripts, backed by SVN, running more shell scripts. This means that anyone familiar with even the basics of Linux/Unix systems administration can wrap their brain around it in no time. On the other hand, it’s also powerful enough to maintain over a thousand servers with ease and sanity.
W00t on being part of the best band o' brothers (and sisters) workforce around.
It has now been over a year since I joined Automattic and I am still as ecstatic about my job as I was on day one!
As a Systems Wrangler, I was venturing into unknown waters, taking on a huge challenge: coming in to a systems administration position. Systems was the missing link in my web career, being the only web-related role I had not worked full time before, despite having had to handle some of the responsibilities the task entails as a developer before.
Since 1994-95, I’ve held the positions of application architect, software developer, interface and user experience designer, database administrator, project and team leader. I’ve dealt with client relationship management and even was co-founder of a consulting firm. I believe that an inherent component of my ultimate personal career vision, which is to be the best team and project lead possible, is that one should be able to actually do everything his/her team members face in their own subject of focus. I am not going to get into the reasoning behind this philosophy, its details being likely as obvious to you as they are to me.
The other challenge implied with the systems administration responsibilities was the scale of it all. WordPress.com and our other properties are after all some of the largest sites on the Web, sporting over a thousand individual servers spread across multiple datacenters, powering millions of blogs, and being home to millions of individual users.
My year in systems had to be THE most challenging I have ever faced in the past. It was also easily one of the best. Combining the people I have the incredible luck to be working with with the constant stimulation it provides was nothing short of – pardon the analogy but… – intellectually orgasmic.
However, hardware, network and systems is not where my heart lies. I found myself missing the creative aspects of development too much. Unarguably, infrastructure design and low-level troubleshooting can require just as much creative thinking as many other web-related tasks, but they did not spur mine as much as development does. One has to be true to his/her own strength and affinities. 🙂
With this in mind, I have now switched to a development role, thanks to Matt and Toni‘s (as well as the entire company’s) firm belief in a happy, inspired and motivated employee invariably translating into a peak-performance one.
I have now joined the ranks of the NUX team, along with Joy, Nikolay, Michael and Terry, as a Code Wrangler. NUX standing for new user experience (or as Matt once put it, the opposite of SUX).
User eXperience (UX) is about how a person feels about using a system. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI) and product ownership, but it also covers a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature, because it is about an individual’s performance, feelings and thoughts about the system. User experience is dynamic, because it changes over time as the circumstances change.
Our team’s primary focus therefore revolves around making sure that our users have the best experience conceivable when using our products, but as every one of our teams, we have a hand in every aspects of the Automattic empire.
Variety is the spice of life and I like it hot. I cannot fathom being any happier!
We, at Automattic, have talked a lot about the challenges telecommuters can face when it comes to health, sanity and sedentism while at our annual meetup. Working from home has a lot of advantages, but it’s sometimes difficult to make a clear transition between work and personal life when it comes to schedule, habits and so on.
Here is what I’ll be experimenting with this week: working from the comfort of my home office in the morning, then take advantage of my lunch break to relocate for the afternoon.
High-speed iPhone/3G tethering, full-featured laptops and long-lasting batteries make these kind of things easily achievable nowadays, without compromising on performance nor productivity. Since I am lucky enough to be provided with all of the tools and flexibility I could potentially need to do so, not taking advantage of them would simply be silly.
The expected work and lifestyle improvements I’m aiming for are:
Making the most of my actual in-house environment in the morning as I flow into my day.
Adding daily exercise to my lunch routine, since I mostly walk/skateboard/bike everywhere.
Avoiding the common telecommuting pitfall of leading a quasi-hermit-like lifestyle (ie: remember to work from home, not live at the office).
A better socio-professional life as this practice will undoubtedly lead me to work from co-working spaces, especially in the Winter when the weather gets harsh.
Having a clear cut-off time, personally driven by having to pickup my kids at school (bonus: more exercise too). The latter doesn’t stop me from working longer hours by coming back online during the evening when needed or when I feel like doing so, but having to physically leave my seat is the perfect way to remind me I also have a personal life.
So here’s to committing to and iterating towards a better lifestyle, and thanks Automattic for not only affording me everything I need to do so but for proactively encouraging the entire workforce to find the right work/life balance.
Now, if only those darn bees would stop buzzing around my head… Working outdoors is a risky business, I want danger pay! 😉
Asides:
When it comes to focusing, no matter your location, nothing beats a good pair of headphones.
When working outdoors, do not compromise on comforts like immediate access to snacks, thirst-quenchers, even bathrooms or you’ll pay for it by having to relocate constantly and your productivity will take a hit.
The photo, title and initial location were all inspired by a photo my friend Javier posted on Facebook.
