I’d love to post a cool street scene of graffiti and show off our urban edge, but the fact is, we are not urban, and we’re certainly not edgy. We live in a quiet Virginia neighborhood where my most frequent interaction with our street is walking our kids to the bus stop in the morning. In winter the wind comes howling down our street off the mountains, and that’s a bummer. But in fall, the sidewalk is littered with crispy leaves and crunchy acorns, and our daughter wears snuggly boots, and the light is perfect and beautiful.
This is my entry for Photography 101: Street. Two days, two photographs – I’m on a roll.
My husband and I courted in the hills of Appalachia. We backpacked in the southern Smokies when I was still a student at the University of Georgia. We took weekend trips to Panthertown Creek in North Carolina, or Chattanooga, Tennessee, and when he and his hiking partner trekked 500 miles from Georgia to Virginia on the Appalachian Trail, I sent him care packages of homemade trail mix, and met him at little towns on the weekends, where we’d stay in B&Bs and eat breakfasts of hot biscuits.
As we got married and grew up, we moved further and further from the green hills and soft forests of our courtship. We moved to the D.C. metro area, where we sat in traffic on the beltway. In four years we never made it to Shenandoah despite a thousand proclamations, “We should head to the mountains this weekend.”
Then we moved to coastal Florida where we sweated it out in the flatlands for eight years. We bought our first house there, and bore our children there. We learned out how to be parents there, and with a seven hour drive just to get out of the state, we lost touch with the mountains, and our younger lives, completely.
When we moved to Minnesota, where we shivered and shoveled through three winters, we had no idea where our lives were taking us, or where we would end up next.
And then.
Then, as my husband’s postdoc drew to an end, and he began applying for faculty positions in Arizona, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, and Arkansas, he applied, and interviewed, for a position at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Back in the Appalachians, in the green hills where we met, in the soft forests where we fell in love. Back in the Appalachians where it’s not too hot and it’s not too cold, where it’s emerald green in the summer, blazing copper in the fall; where the world turns bleak in winter, and bursts into blossom in spring.
Back in the Appalachians where we’re raising our children – where we now live. Back in the Appalachians where we’re home.
This is my kickoff post for Photography 101: Home. My ambition is to post a photo a day as part of the course – I’ve got my fingers crossed that I can do it.
In the month of October, I focused a large portion of my extracurricular work time on training new Automatticians and Happiness Engineer trials. We covered tools, tickets, tone – and in every session, a trainee taught me something new.
This is a reason I love to teach. The joy of a student’s discovery is always contagious, and that delights me, but I also love teaching because I learn. Trainees’ questions show me gaps in my approach, our tools, our assumptions, my own knowledge; their strategies show me new thought processes and workflows; their knowledge enlightens me in areas I previously lacked insight.
The student becomes the teacher.
For the month of November I am super excited about another opportunity for this exchange of knowledge: starting Monday November 3, I will be providing support for the Blogging 101: Zero to Hero course. I am giddy for the opportunity. New and experienced bloggers are going to bring a freshness and impart unique perspectives to each other and to those of us helping out. I can’t wait to see how everyone approaches the daily assignments, and I’m eager to help bloggers navigate their WordPress.com dashboards, find themes, fidget with widgets, and press that beautiful blue Publish button.
I’ve been through almost all of the Blogging U courses, and even after several years of blogging, I learned new tricks from the assignments and the community. Now, as a former student, I will (sort of) be a teacher. That’s kind of awesome.
Whether you are new to blogging or are a seasoned pro, these courses are approachable, fun, flexible, and free – did I mention they are free? I encourage you to take advantage of them if you have any interest in blogging, writing, or photography. And if you do decide to sign up, I’ll be there, ready to support you, and ready to learn from you.
Do you want to be a blogging superhero? Register here for Blogging 101 or the brand new Photography 101. Courses begin November 3, 2014.
I always think of spring as being the beautiful season, with its bright pink flowers, its new green leaves, and the reawakening to life after the cold hardness of winter. But the deep tones of fall – the mustards, the rubies – remind me that there is as exquisite a beauty in going to sleep as there is in waking up.
This photograph was taken on a rainy October day in our townhouse parking lot. The mundane scene was beautiful to me, and this photo is my entry to the Daily Post’s Dreamy photo challenge.
Several friends have asked, “How’s your writing going?” now that I’ve got a full-time job. While I haven’t been writing as much for my blogs as I was when I was a stay-at-home-mom, I am excited that my job as a Happiness Engineer involves writing All. Day. Long.
Even more thrilling, especially for a writer working on craft, the types of writing I do throughout the day are varied and hone different types of skills: bug reports and internal blog posts require technical writing; support documents require the ability to translate technical information into understandable language; support replies and chat messages call for skill with tone, specificity, and brevity. Most fun is that the internal messaging we do through Slack allows me to write like I talk – it’s the place to write easily and with humor, especially in our water cooler channels where we goof off and post lots of GIFs.
This week I and many Automatticians have been writing about our workdays, and today I want to approach from a writing angle, with word count estimates pulled from my Wednesday workday.
For a little background, I am a Happiness Engineer on the Store team, and my days consist mainly of providing live chat support to Business and Enterprise users. What this means is that I am always working to improve the WordPress.com experience by troubleshooting issues live with users, by submitting bug reports, updating documents, testing, and by being in constant internal communication with teammates. While on live chat, we collaborate in real-time on Slack. We troubleshoot together so we can give the best possible solution to the user on the line.
What this means is that we all read and write. A lot. And quickly. So I thought it would be interesting to look at my day in terms of communication inputs and outputs. The graph above shows an estimated word count output for Wednesday, October 8, not including this blog post, which I count as personal word count (Slack and O2s/P2s are our internal communication tools):
Support Chat messages: 250+ (2500+ words in 14 chats)
Internal Slack messages: 240+ (2400+ words)
Support tickets answered: 12 (1600+ words)
O2 comments: 7 (189 words)
O2 posts: 1 (82 words)
Trac tickets: 1 (65 words)
Support docs updated: 1 (14 words)
Words spoken aloud: 1
emails: 0
TOTAL: 6769+ words
**Number of times I laughed out loud: 14
By the time I manually added up estimated my word output, I did not have it in me to go back and calculate the word count for all the O2 posts, O2 comments, Slack back scrolls, live chat messages, and tickets I read today, so I’ll break it down by unit instead of word count:
Communication input and output for Oct 8, 2014
I found it funny that I only spoke one word aloud during my work day. The one word I spoke was “Bye!” as we all signed off of our team video hangout.
You’ll probably notice something strange there on the email line as well: those 40+ emails I read were notifications of blogs I follow that are relevant to my work or to the company as a whole. We do not use email as a means of communication for the most part – we interact via Slack, where we text chat synchronously, and via blogs that are open to the entire company. Unlike email, which is closed and only available to the senders and recipients, all company communication is archived and available for anyone at Auttomattic to read and participate in. This makes Automattic an extraordinarily democratic, and empowering, work environment: every Automattician has access to everything. I think a lot of work environments would benefit from the open discussion that inline commenting on a blog facilitates when compared with the closed system of email.
So how’s my writing going? It’s going awesome. With all the practice I’m getting on the job, and as our family settles into a new routine to accommodate me working again, I’m slowly adding personal writing back into my life as well. In fact, this post bumps my total word count to 7000+ words for the day. Not bad for a writer who’s trying to make time to write.
In an effort to get to know each other’s work days better, and to share publicly what it is like to work for a distributed company where most of us work from home, some of us at Automattic will be publishing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs throughout this week. The posts will be tagged #a8cday if you’d like to follow along. And if you think a job like this sounds awesome, join us! We’re hiring.
Butterfly Mind 