I’m under the canopy of my dogwood tree, which is thick with green leaves. It’s cool here in the shade. Fat lavender buds sway next to me in the wind. A purple finch drinks from the bird bath, which I refreshed with clean water a few minutes ago. Birds twitter, and the warm scent of roses drifts on the breeze.
I like this office space.
My garden office.
Shown on screen: Want to make the web a better place for more than a billion people each month? We’re hiring at Automattic if you want to check out our job listings.
When I applied for my job as a Happiness Engineer, I wasn’t entirely sure what the job would entail. The job title is unique, for sure, and when I wore my Happiness Engineer T-shirt on my way to the company’s Grand Meetup, three different people stopped me to ask “What’s a Happiness Engineer?” All three smiled when I told them.
Before I became an Automattician, I’d seen Happiness Engineers write Daily Post and Hot off the Press articles, speak at WordCamps, provide live support in Happiness Bars at WordCamps, answer questions in the public forums, and answer my own questions about my blog through email requests. Given that knowledge, I created the above Venn diagram for my résume when I applied.
Once I started working as a Happiness Engineer, though, I realized there need to be about 20 more fields in that diagram: Domain Dominator, Toy Tester, P2 Poster, Ticket Translator, User Empathizer, Live Chat Champion. Even now, I only know what my day looks like, and not what other HEs’ days look like.
Over the next week, many Happiness Engineers and other Automatticians, including myself, will be sharing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs. I’ve got a big day planned today – I’ll be training new Happiness trials for my first time – but I’ll try to keep notes so I can share with you when the day is done. If you have any questions or special requests for what you’d like to see in my post(s), please let me know in the comments below. And if you think you’d like to work with us but aren’t quite clear on what the job might entail, be sure to follow along! We will be using the tag #a8cday.
I can’t wipe this grin off my face. Remember that job I’ve been alluding to and that I’ve been working towards the past few months? I got it!
On September 4, 2014 – my 40th birthday – I begin my career with Automattic, a web company that describes its services using haiku, that has employees distributed all over the world, and whose creed begins “I will never stop learning.”
And oh yeah, Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com.
I am now an ecstatic and enormously proud member of a working family whose passion I share: to democratize publishing. In my role as a Happiness Engineer I will work my heart out to help WordPress.com users in their quest to put their work out into the world – their photography, writing, podcasts, videos; their wedding pages, book blogs, portfolios, caregiver stories; their poetry, band pages, musings, and travelogues. I’ll be there for all of them, and all of you.
Andrea + Automattic = Awesome
I haven’t really absorbed yet that this is real. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for 10 years, and throughout those years I have struggled with the tension inherent in wanting to be home with our children but also craving the stimulus of work that challenged my mind. Now I will have both. And it doesn’t hurt that I get to work with all these smart, funny people either. I feel like the luckiest woman alive.
I also feel like I want to give an Oscars style thank you speech. So first, I’d like to thank Cheri Lucas Rowlands who Freshly Pressed one of my early blog posts, and in so doing, introduced me to the world of possibilities within the WordPress.com community. Through Cheri’s work I later came to know others on the editorial staff, and I’d like to thank Krista Stevens, Ben Huberman, and Michelle Weber for engaging so much with me and the rest of the WP.com community, for inviting me to guest host a Daily Post writing challenge, and for sending me a care package with a copy of Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants and the Happiness Engineer tee shirt you see in the photo above. Those gifts and all of my interactions with editorial made me say, holy crap, I want to work with this company.
I’d also like to thank Deborah Beckett and Evan Zimmerman who took the time to talk with me at WordCamp Asheville about their experiences as Happiness Engineers with Automattic; all of the hilarious and super smart Automatticians who trained, supported, and helped me throughout my trial; and CEO Matt Mullenweg who I had the pleasure of chatting with as the final step in my hire, and who is kind, respectful, and like, the nicest guy ever.
Finally, I want to thank my family: my husband who took over most of my house-related work during my trial, and our kids who took over the rest of it. This hire is as much due to their hard work as it is to mine. I love you guys 🙂
Get your bookmarking finger ready – lots of blogging resources ahead.
I received a care package from the WordPress.com team a few weeks ago after I guest hosted a writing challenge for The Daily Post. In that package was a book: The Year Without Pants, the cover of which our children thought was hilarious. I put aside whatever I was reading at the time and read Berkun’s story cover to cover. In it, he writes about his year at WordPress.com during which, as the title suggests, he worked remotely and had no need for pants.
This book made me want to work for WordPress.
(And when I told our kids why the book was called The Year Without Pants – because Automatticians work from home and therefore don’t need pants – they wanted me to work for WordPress too).
In addition to making me want to work for Automattic, the company that makes WordPress.com possible, this book also opened my eyes to how powerful WordPress is as a blogging platform, not just because of the tools, themes, and continual upgrades it provides, but because of the culture it cultivates. The WordPress community is vast – users produce about 44.5 million new posts and 56.7 million new comments each month (from WordPress.com Stats) – and the folks who work for WordPress, as Berkun describes in his book, are constantly striving to provide tools for bloggers to improve and become the best we can be.
In my two years here on WordPress.com I have read many articles that I knew would help me hone my blogging skills, but at the time they pinged my inbox, I was not ready to process their information. Now that I feel comfortable in my blogging skin – enough so that I’m no longer focused solely on writing but also on crafting a user-friendly, easily navigable resource on my new Andrea Reads America blog – I am digging deeper into the tools WordPress provides. And despite my advice to you to warm up your bookmarking finger, I decided that instead of bookmarking (because I never go back and look at my bookmarks), I would list the resources I plan to dig into for Andrea Reads America (and possibly Butterfly Mind) here.
After two years of blogging on WordPress.com, these are the elements that I keep coming back to each time I find myself wanting to tailor my sites. Over the next few weeks, as I work towards achieving the goals I set for myself in the debut Blogging 201 assignment, I plan to dogear – and ultimately implement – the pages listed above. I hope you find them helpful too.
Do you have any go-to articles that helped you get your blog just the way you like it? Please share if you do!
Butterfly Mind 