I love working remotely. Working for Automattic is especially solid, since our entire company is distributed. There is no office anywhere, although we do have a building in San Francisco for events and visiting Automatticians.
Scott recently tweeted about one of the advantages that working remotely offers:
He’s absolutely right. Over the last two years I’ve shrunk my required inventory to be productive down to a pretty tiny footprint. Check it out:
On Focus:
The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
On Expectations:
It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.
On Customers:
No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.
All from W. Edward Deming
One of my ongoing projects is helping my dear friend and colleague Daryl brainstorm on how we can most effectively translate our goals into simple, pretty, and actionable visualizations – I always harp on the import of actionable visualization.
In spending more time with modern visualization tools, like everyone, I’ve come across d3.js – a JavaScript library dedicated to Data Driven Documents (d3 get it?)
I read a blog post or two (Mike Bostocks is amazing) and dove into messing around with the library. For fun, I used d3.js to turn an empty pair of body tags into an SVG assembly of the Automattic logo, as you see above. As deep as my affection is for ggplot2, this is still pretty neat.
It was fun, and I’m especially excited to see how d3 plays with live data!
The above is a screenshot – here’s a gist of the code itself.
If you work in hospitality on the internet, or even really UX of any flavor, you should know about Support Driven – it’s a blog, it’s a podcast, it’s a Slack group!
And now, the fine folks at Support Driven (including my dear friends Andrea and Andrew) are organizing an all-new conference, with a really interesting take on the speaker submission and development process. If you work with customers, as a support person or as a data person or really in any form, you should look into this conference – especially if you have something to say!
Talks are only 15 minutes long and are focused on actionable results – do you have a lesson or story that could enrich the experience of other folks in customer-facing roles? You should absolutely submit a talk!
Working at Automattic has a lot of advantages: working remotely, amazing coworkers, and the chance to make a real difference in the future of the internet (I really believe that!)
Being a Team Lead in this environment, leading one of our many Happiness Teams focused on the WordPress.com customer base, is unlike any job I’ve ever had, and for me, one piece that I really value above all else, is the opportunity to experiment – not just on the work itself, but also on the meta-work, on the work of the work. The larger structure, the larger idea. Being able to question and adjust and iterate is both amazing and a little scary.
Simon Ouderkirk 