Today is kind of exciting, although it’s been a long time coming so it’s not much of a surprise for me 🙂 Today Scott Berkun, the author of books such as The Myths of Innovation, and Confessions of a Public Speaker, releases his latest book, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work.
The book gives an inside look at what it’s like to work at Automattic, and to work on something like WordPress.com. Scott was my direct team lead (of the team that I now lead) while he was at Automattic, so the book contains a lot of personal interaction with yours truly. It also happens to be a fun read with a bunch of interesting insights into distributed teams, management, and the open-source-based culture we have at Automattic, and which may well be the future of many more companies.
I’ve read versions all the way back to some of the first drafts, and am right now reading the “final” version which I received in hard copy. You should go get it and read it as well.
Looks quite interesting! Does the “without pant” refer to the fact that he lived away from the rest of the team (under the sun!) for some time?
It was actually a running joke about the way that we work completely distributed: no one would ever know if we ever wore pants to work 🙂
One Year and Ten Months Without Pants | By Lloyd Dewolf
I’ve nearly finished the book. Great read. How did you find the time zone issues working on this side of the pacific?
Time zones were the worst thing around the whole distributed arrangement. I’m actually based in the US normally, so it only affected me when I was back in Australia temporarily. It was pretty isolating (on a personal level), and introduced some hurdles (being blocked on other people finishing things at times), but other than that, it wasn’t too bad.