Category: work
-
Resuscitating Canaries
There are a couple of processes at work that I think of as canaries. They are the first things that start to slip when I (or a teammate) is no longer working at their best. The actual task is different for each person but usually it’s something that is supposed to be done regularly; it…
-
Stuck in the Story
Sometimes we are just going about our day, minding our own business when out of the blue we are “acted upon by an outside force.” A car cuts in front of us, we get bad news at work (or, more likely, vague news that we don’t know what to do with), Our spouse turns up…
-
On doing a “Good Job”
I was talking to a teammate the other day about work feelings and she said something profound : You want to do a good job, and you want others to think you are doing a good job. She didn’t say it as a great epiphany, more like a statement of obvious fact: of course you…
-
The little things
I turned my desk around last week so I can look out the window (and not look like I’m in the witness protection program on Zoom calls) and it has totally changed how I feel about my office. It was always fine, but now it’s cozy and delightful. Never underestimate the power even small changes…
-
Swift Playground
I went to WordCamp Cincinnati last weekend*, and while I was there overheard one of my co-workers talking about a “learn to code” program for iPad geared towards kids. Using Swift, the program has you write little bits of code to help an alien solve puzzles. It’s totally made for kids, and I’m totally hooked. More…
-
Tech Support in the Wild
John and I went to see Thor: Raggnarok last night. The movie was awesome, but this post is not about that. It’s about this: the sweet chairs that many movie theaters have these days. We got to our seats and tried to recline, only to discover that both of our seats were broken. So much…
-
9 years of WordPress.com
I got this note the other day reminding me that I started using WordPress.com 9 years ago. The friend I was helping set up his site still uses the same theme, so you can see the first post almost exactly the same way it looked in 2009. I’ve learned a lot about writing for the…
-
Building communities one pixel at a time
There are a million things I love about my job, but the thing I love the most (right now at least) is that it gives me a way to help people use technology to realize their own dreams and the dreams of their communities. I wasn’t able to be in Detroit for this project, but I spend…
-
A Day in the Life
This post is part of a series describing what Automatticians do on a daily basis. You can read more posts like this by following the tag #a8cday on WordPress.com and Twitter. 7:30 AM: This is when I intend to get up. If I set the coffee pot to brew the night before, I often manage…
-
That’s How I got to Automattic
Several events have converged over the last week or so that have resulted in this wildly overdue “How I became a Happiness Engineer” post. One is you may have noticed my blog has a shiny new domain name. My employer, Automattic, is the company behind the new .blog top level domain and they gave each…
Mo's Musings 