Last weekend, my friend and colleague, Zandy Ring, and I spoke at WordCamp US in Nashville. Our topic was “Remote Control: Establishing Accountability and Expectations in a Distributed Environment.” Here is our blurb:
Category: Work
Whistler, Canada
I didn’t expect my last post to be so popular! It’s made me nervous to post again, because I definitely won’t write anything as good — to all my new followers, so that you know what to expect, I blog about once a month. These days, I tend to write about 1/3 each feminist rants, book reviews, and pointless essays about minor things in my life. And then about twice a year I write something about travel. Most everything I write is extremely long. Which brings us to this post!
Dot Blog
Astute readers might note that I have a new domain: elizabeth.blog. My company, Automattic, has the rights to .blog, so they gave me this very nice one to use here. How exciting is that! A new year, a new domain. I’m supposed to post at least once per month while using this domain, but I of course have grand plans to post more frequently again. Maybe twice a month! We’ll see how it goes. Merry Christmas, all!
A Partial List of Fictional Characters I Have Strongly Identified With Since I Began Leading a Team
Jon Snow Tony Soprano Liz Lemon Selina Myer Maria von Trapp Ron in Party Down Basil Fawlty Things I Have Spent a Decent Amount of Mental Energy Comparing to Leadership, Only to Suddenly Realize I Am Doing So and Feel Sheepish About It: Magic the Gathering (in particular, assembling a good deck)
My Calendar
I work from home and one of the main questions that I get from people is, “So what is your day like, exactly? Do you have trouble staying on task?” People want to hear about coffee shops and working from the beach and going for long rambles in the sunshine in midday, and for a lot of my coworkers, that is actually probably what it’s like. But I’m a boring, depressive hermit, so my days are honestly probably a lot like the days of anyone who works in an office, except I’m at home.
Poem
As I’ve mentioned before, every year my company has a grand meetup and we are all required to give a 4 minute-long flash talk on a topic of our choosing. In the past, I’ve spoken on rabbits and the underrated art of lying. This year, I read a poem: Watching this now makes me realize I actually really miss performing.
My a8c Story
As most of you know, I work as a Happiness Engineer for Automattic (a8c, for short), which means I provide support for people who use WordPress.com. This week, a bunch of my colleagues are posting about our daily work. If you’re interested in what people who have my same job do every day, check out the posts under the a8cday tag.
WordCamp Philly 2014
Originally posted on Karen Alma:
Two of my colleagues (Deborah Beckett and Elizabeth Urello) and I spoke about support at WordCamp Philadelphia this weekend. This is a modification of the talk I did in Nicaragua a few weeks ago. Elizabeth Urello gets credit for the original idea 🙂 Sadly, these images don’t let you hear our delightful anecdotes and as I like simple slides with not too much info you will just have to imagine the spoken bit. Someday soonish I am sure it will be up on WordCamp.tv. So stay tuned. Here are the slides:
To Blog, or Not to Blog?
As many of you know, I work for WordPress.com. I help people with their blogs all day, I encourage people to blog, I blog about how people should blog, I speak at events telling people how to blog. But I don’t really blog very often.
Flash Talks
Every year, my company, Automattic, has a grand meetup somewhere in the world. We are a distributed company and currently we have ~140 employees who work from all over the world. While we have many smaller group meetups throughout the year, the yearly grand meetup is the only time we all get to see each other in person. One of the traditions is that everyone in the company must give a five-minute “flash talk” on any subject. Here are mine so far — In September 2012 in San Diego, I spoke about rabbits: And in September 2013 in Santa Cruz,…
