Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants is a first person narrative of his time employed at Automattic from August 2010 to May 2012. Berkun entered Automattic as employee number fifty six when the company was replacing its totally flat structure with a team-based one. Berkun’s story centers around his experience managing Team Social, which was…
This is a nice backstory from Wired on the rise of Nginx, with a focus on how Automattic got involved in the project when they started using it for WordPress.com. Now, Nginx is powering 15 percent of all websites. I especially like the note at the bottom of the article where the founder of Nginx cites…
Philip Arthur Moore is the Premium Theme team lead at Automattic. I’m thrilled to have been able to ask Philip some questions about WordPress.com premium themes, their processes, and working at Automattic. His answers are thorough and very insightful, and I’m thankful for the time he spent on this. You’re the Premium Theme Lead at…
WordPress.com has introduced a new API today called WordPress.com Connect. It’s an API to allow websites and applications to offer login capability for WordPress.com users. It’s not surprising Automattic has introduced this feature. After all, they have tons of services that obviously already use something similar to link their WordPress.com, Akismet, PollDaddy, and VaultPress products. In…
The Automattic Jetpack team has announced a handy guide for people that want to contribute to Jetpack. I should probably learn from this, as historically, my methods for contributing to Jetpack have been by whining on Twitter. I wish more plugins had detailed contribution instructions like this.
Web designers tend to be pretty particular about their designs. However, often times, if you watch how end users use a website, it can be surprising when they don’t do things how the designer and developer would expect. Perhaps the client or buyer didn’t have images for a section of the website where you expected…
Matt Mullenweg just delivered the 2013 State of the Word, his annual update about WordPress. He started off discussing the history of WCSF, and the first WordCamp San Francisco 8 years ago. It was pretty low tech at first, and organizers have learned a great deal since then. There have in fact been 314 WordCamp’s…
WP Engine has been working on Torque for a number of months. Their tagline for it, as it turns out, is “The WordPress News Core.” Beyond that, they don’t particularly say on the site how they plan to frame the content, but they’ve kicked things off with a number of posts from prominent community members,…
Mel Choyce recently joined Automattic as a Design Engineer. In this post, she talks about her experience doing customer support her first few weeks on the job. This has become a well known stage of employment for those that join Automattic, and I always love to learn about the takeaways that various new hires get…
Automattic has acquired Lean Domain Search, a domain search tool. The website allows users to enter a number of usernames they’d like to search, and then creates a nifty table of potential domain names involving those keywords. Founder Matt Mazur will move into a full time role with Automattic and WordPress.com. edit: here’s a nice…
Let’s pull the bandaid off real quick, and it won’t hurt as bad: Theme Framework has turned into a marketing term. I lean more every day to giving theme framework the premium treatment. Just because a product costs money doesn’t make it premium at all. Nevertheless, the marketing term came and it stuck, and almost…
Automattic acquired what is probably the most popular third party WordPress publishing app, Poster. Tom Witkin, Poster’s developer, is joining Automattic to work on the official WordPress mobile apps. There’s a little more info on Mac Stories, TechCrunch and WP Daily, if you’re interested. I enjoy using the WordPress for iOS app, and am keen to have custom…
Automattic has been making pretty good money for some time. But in order to help early investors lock in returns, they’ve partnered with Tiger Global for an $50 million investment of Automattic secondary stock. It’s not the same as raising money, according to both the Founder, Matt Mullenweg and CEO, Toni Schneider, who independently blogged about the event.
VaultPress, the Automattic backup solution, has introduced a “Lite” plan to their repertoire. It allows you to receive daily backups with a thirty day archive for only $5 per month. It also includes their site restore service. This is the first time I’ve ever felt VaultPress had a convincing option for small websites.
Scott Berkun spent a year working for Automattic as research for his upcoming book, A Year Without Pants. The book will focus on remote work, for which Automattic is well known. Berkun is going to, “share what I learned about creativity, productivity, and leadership from the kind of workplace that might be in everyone’s future.”…
I had a thought after seeing Brian’s tweet about his #WCATL presentation: “I wish that I could get all these cool WP peeps together & do some kind of WordCamp where we could all meet each other in person.” Seeing as how most of Automattic (and the WP community at large) is distributed it led…
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