I thought I would share a few snaps to prove that we actually worked in Cyprus:
And a few snaps when we weren’t working:
I just returned last week from my first Automattic team meetup in Cyprus, where I spent an amazing week in a beautiful place surrounded by awesome people. Folks, it doesn’t get much better than that.
My team is composed of developers and support staff who work together to design, develop, support, and improve the paid upgrades available through the WordPress.com store. Like the rest of Automattic, we’re spread across the globe, so we get together several times a year as a team to work and play in person.
Folks from Bulgaria, Austria, England, Ireland, Australia, Israel, Wales, France, and Switzerland*, and of course, people from all over the US, converged at the at the Columbia Beach Resort, which is a bit remote but beautiful. I was fascinated with all of the different accents and learning about the places where my co-workers live.
(*I hope I didn’t leave anyone’s home country out.)
English people and Americans apparently do not speak the same language. We had several entertaining discussions and a few lively debates on:
I also picked up some new slang and colloquialisms, and since words and language fascinate me, this was endlessly entertaining. For example, my Welsh co-worker replied “Bang tidy!” to a group text, setting off a firestorm of “What does that mean??” replies.
According to her, it means something to the effect of “totally awesome”, but it sounds so much better to me. In fact, it sounds rather tidy. Bang tidy, I would even say. And it might just be my new favorite expression.
One of my relatives posted this comment in response to one of my Facebook posts while I was in Cyprus:
Are you actually working?
Yes, yes we were. While there, we accomplished quite a bit. I have proof.
We managed to complete three projects, rack up a huge bar tab, climb a mountain, tour nearby towns and ruins, consume an extraordinary quantity of food, make friends with several cats who live at the resort, do a little shopping, dip our toes in the Mediterranean, and play a couple of marathon games of Cards Against Humanity.
But the best part was that we had the opportunity to meet each other in person and have time to get to know each other better. And that’s really what the trip was all about.
I just got back yesterday from the fabulous NMX/BlogWorld conference in Las Vegas. We had an awesome booth right at the front of the room, where I had the pleasure of talking with all kinds of folks: everyone from veteran WordPress users to brand new users to people who just wanted to know what WordPress is.
While I enjoy talking to just about anyone in the WordPress community, I think I most enjoy talking to folks who are just getting started and are full of questions. It’s very gratifying to me to help someone go from uninformed or even completely confused about WordPress or the web in general to confident and ready to create their own site.
To me, that’s a huge part of the beauty of WordPress – it’s simple enough for just about anyone to use yet powerful and scalable enough to handle huge and complex sites.
I’ll post some pics of Vegas on my personal blog soon.
One of the perks of being an Automattician is the ability to travel all over the world. Fabulous, right?
My maiden voyage as an Automattician was to our annual Grand Meetup in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, California where I spent 8 crazy days with some of the nicest, most welcoming, and funniest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. A good time was had by all. See pics at the bottom of this post for proof.
Speaking of meeting people, since we are a 100% distributed company, I had only met one other Automattician face-to-face before this trip, but that quickly changed, starting at baggage claim at SFO where I was greeted by a small group of my co-workers who landed around the same time as me. It was a lovely welcome that set the tone for the rest of day. By the end of the day, I estimate that I had met roughly 75 to 100 of the 200+ Automatticians gathered at the company office.
Words really can’t describe how uh-MAZE-ing this trip was. I can’t decide if my favorite thing was meeting almost all of my co-workers, hearing the many accents from around the world (did you know Finnish people roll all of their r’s?), learning about so many different cultures and countries, the 4-minute flash talks that everyone had to do, or learning some cool code during my Code Academy sessions.
Or maybe it was the presentations and workshops on creativity and on legal issues affecting the web and Automattic (think NSA and the like), Scott Berkun’s book talk on The Year Without Pants, or the project presentations as people rolled out improvements and pushed code in the midst of all of this. Or maybe it was the food! <sigh>
As awesome as all of that was, I think at the tippy top of my list in no particular order are putting faces and voices together with the names and personalities of my teammates that I’ve come to know so well over IRC, P2s, and Skype and getting to meet and shake the hand of our founder Matt Mullenweg, who greeted me by name before I could introduce myself. Despite doubling the size of the company over the last year, I think he knows everyone’s face and name – an incredible feat and a testament to a personal and personable leadership style.
Have I mentioned yet how incredible this whole experience was? I’ll have to stop here before I start gushing over the whole thing. Check out my pics or find out how awesome it is for yourself….we’re hiring. 🙂