#automattic

Automattic is a global web services company, dedicated to making the web a better place through the democratization of publishing. They are the makers of WordPress.com, Gravatar, Akismet, VaultPress, Polldaddy and more.

The Year Without Pants

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.

o2 at WordCamp San Francisco

I just realized that I never posted anything about speaking at WordCamp San Francisco. This was my 8th WordCamp SF (I’ve been to every one since the first, in 2006), and the second one at which I have spoken. Matt invited me to give a short introduction to the work we’re doing with o2, which is the next generation of P2. It’s not available for external (non-Automattic) use yet, so I had to settle for a relatively surface introduction, and couldn’t give people a link to download it or anything which was a bit of a pity, but it still got a good reception.

o2 is a pretty different approach to building on top of WordPress, and has meant a steep learning curve for my team and me. We’ve been digging deep into the world of front-end development, and ramping up quickly on Backbone.js, Underscore.js and a bunch of new development approaches and workflows. It’s been really fun. I’ll let the presentation do the talking though (you can also watch it on WordPress.tv):

And here are the slides I used, which you can also see on Slideshare.net.

We’re really excited to get o2 out into other people’s hands, but we’ve got a lot to build still before other people can experience it in a similar way to how we do at Automattic. The future is bright.