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.Continue reading “My a8c Story”
Category Archives: Work
WordCamp Philly 2014
On Saturday, my colleagues and I gave a talk at WordCamp Philly on how to get a reputation for outstanding support without significantly increasing the time you spend giving it. If you’re a developer, designer, or website builder (or if you ever have occasion to work with clients), check out our slides here!
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. Continue reading “To Blog, or Not to Blog?”
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, I came out as a proud liar:
(Thanks to my colleague, Aaron Douglas, for posting his flash talk and giving me the idea to post these.)
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:
Traffic Building for Beginning Bloggers
Here are my slides from this morning’s WordCamp Albuquerque talk on Traffic Building. Thanks to everyone who attended! Remember to stop by the Happiness Bar later for help with your site. 🙂
Accismus 