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!
Category: Work
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,…
Blogging as Non-Traditional Support Documentation
Today, I spoke at the Budapest Write the Docs. I talked about what I’ve learned about documentation through posting on the WordPress.com blog and The Daily Post. Andrew Spittle wrote a good summary of my talk here. Here are the slides: The talk went well, but clearly I neglected to hem my pants beforehand: Photo by @ashthemighty
In Defense of Lying
Every year, my company has its grand meet-up, and everyone must give a 4-minute “flash talk” on any subject. This year I spoke on my wish that more people would lie more frequently. Lies are nearly always more entertaining than the truth, they are often less awkward than the truth, and lying creatively probably staves off Alzheimer’s for the liar. If you don’t often lie, give it a try! Here are the slides from my talk:
