Category: Get Involved

Automattic Engineering Culture on Key Values

Automattic is hiring engineers across mobile and web, frontend and backend. Recently we partnered with Key Values to highlight our top values, from open communication and open source all the way to flexible work location and a focus on teams.

Listing of Automattic engineering values on the Key Values website.

Top values include:

  • Open communication: As a distributed company, communication is our oxygen.
  • Open source contributor: We believe open source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.
  • Committed to personal growth: The first line of our creed: “I’ll never stop learning.”
  • Flexible work arrangements: Set up remotely in a way that works for you — and take the time off you need.
  • High employee retention: Automattic employees tend to stay at Automattic: Our retention rate for Code Wranglers and JS Engineers is 86% over the last 5 years.
  • Heavily team oriented: Teams are how we organize our work, communication, meetups, and impact.
  • Engages with community: We are more motivated by impact than money.
  • Engineering-driven: First and foremost, we are an engineering company. Engineers are the ambassadors of our company and community.
A view of Automattic employees.

Check out the full list of Automattic engineering values here: https://www.keyvalues.com/automattic. And, if anything matches your interests and passion, please apply!

Lance Willett: My altMBA Roundup

I took part in the 20th altMBA group, April–May 2018. A wonderful experience! I highly recommend it for folks looking to challenge themselves, grow into leadership, and meet motivated folks with a similar mindset.

Screenshot from the altMBA info page.

The altMBA is an intensive, 4-week online workshop designed by Seth Godin for high-performing individuals who want to level up and lead.

AltMBA website

I found the course a larger time commitment than expected, much more than 2-3 nights a week and all day Sunday. Ended up being every day for me, at least a few hours of homework, if not more. The main task of the smaller group you’re assigned is to review each others’ work—three to four homework assignments a week. My altMBA experience, like many things in life, gave me back much more when I put in more.

What I didn’t expect was that shipping my homework wasn’t all; I also reviewed and commented on my group members’ work, then had two more steps for each assignment: rewrite mine again based on the feedback, and then publish it publicly.

The small group cohort style and tools are familiar to those working remotely at a company like Automattic: Zoom, Slack, WordPress. There are coaches that help out at various times, but most of it is self-study or a small group effort. The altMBA team sends you a box of books ahead, and if I had to do it over, I’d read them more carefully. I referenced them a ton during the coursework and group sessions—and have continued to use many of the books as a reference.

Overall, the course was worth the investment in my case. I still keep in touch with my small group, including on the alumni website, and made a few great friends there. People still connect with me on LinkedIn to share stories, ask for advice, and check in on the work I shared—much of which related to taking bigger steps in my career. Indeed, the “forced” growth via the exercises and homework became essential to taking a bigger leap at work last year. I’m grateful.

My shipped projects are on Medium: medium.com/@lancewillett — the platform and format were required; otherwise I’d prefer publishing on WordPress. Here’s an article that made it back to this blog: A Napkin Sketch is Enough.

Tucson Parks Foundation

I’m proud to announce I’ve joined the Tucson Parks Foundation as board member.

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Screenshot of the Tucson Parks Foundation website.

The Foundation supplements and supports the City of Tucson Parks & Recreation’s programs, services, and capital projects: particularly for children, at-risk youth, seniors, and the disabled.

In my years in Tucson I’ve enjoyed the beautiful parks, sports fields, attending a wide variety of events — so I’m proud and happy to give back to the cause.

Since the website is powered by WordPress, naturally my role includes webmaster duties (grin). More broadly, I’m serving on the marketing and promotion committee: helping to communicate and engage with our community via social media, the website, email, and other traditional channels.

Are you a non-profit in Tucson or Southern Arizona? I’d love to interview you briefly on how you use your website to collect payments, such as donations and member dues. Please contact me if you’re interested in chatting about this.

 

Tide: Automated Testing for WordPress Plugins and Themes

Yet another way to contribute! Remember this 20-piece WordPress contribution chart with the tester Easter Egg? Even though testing is growing stronger in WordPress core with each release, it’s still mostly manual — usability, visual regression, accessibility, and beta testing with real sites before launch.

Now the tide is turning a bit more toward automation. I’m beyond thrilled to see this!

Tide is a new software test automation project kicking off in WordPress core.

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Screenshot of the Tide page on Make WordPress.

Announced at WCUS 2017 Tide is: “A path to better code across the WordPress ecosystem” — tools to run automated tests for all themes and plugins in the WordPress official directories.

From the XWP team announcement:

Tide, a project started here at XWP and supported by Google, Automattic, and WP Engine, aims to equip WordPress users and developers to make better decisions about the plugins and themes they install and build.

Tide is a service, consisting of an API, Audit Server, and Sync Server, working in tandem to run a series of automated tests against the WordPress.org plugin and theme directories. Through the Tide plugin, the results of these tests are delivered as an aggregated score in the WordPress admin that represents the overall code quality of the plugin or theme. A comprehensive report is generated, equipping developers to better understand how they can increase the quality of their code.

Once up and running these automated tests would update the plugin and theme description with a status and score so everyone knows whether they pass the tests or not, from PHP version compatibility to the quality of the “front-end output.”

The Tide project is now officially moved over to the WordPress project. See the related story on WP Tavern for a longer history. And, if you’re curious like me about the tech “innards” — take a look at the source code on GitHub.

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Screenshot of the Tide API plugin code on GitHub.

I love the genesis of the name:

…inspired by the proverb ‘A rising tide lifts all boats,’ thinking that if a tool like this could lower the barrier of entry to good quality code for enough developers, it could lift the quality of code across the whole WordPress ecosystem.” Rob Stinson

One key to success: Tide makes it super easy for developers to identify weaknesses in their code — and learn how to fix them. It’s not just about getting a high score or to ranking better against a minimum requirement. It’ll teach us all to improve. I love that.

Gutenberg is the Next-Generation Engine for WordPress

If you use and love WordPress, this is must-watch TV: Gutenberg showcased during the annual State of the Word including a bit of amazing live editing by Matías Ventura. We’ll be seeing much more in 2018, and as everyone starts testing it more — the team improves it daily and progress ramps up — and eventually it comes to the rest of the world via an official WordPress release.

Matt previously laid out the vision with We Called it Gutenberg for a Reason (August 2017).

The Automattic VIP team shared a useful overview: The New WordPress Editor: What You Need to Know about Gutenberg. My colleague Ian Stewart gives his angle in Why I’m so excited about the Gutenberg Editor for WordPress.

I also highly recommend watching Morten Rand-Hendriksen’s Gutenberg and the WordPress of Tomorrow presentation from WordCamp US 2017.

If you’re brand new to the project, start here: Introducing a new way to WordPress.

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Introducing a new way to WordPress: Gutenberg.

 

 

 

To get involved with Gutenberg, head over to GitHub for design and development, follow along with team updates on Make WordPress, and — of course install the plugin and start using it if you haven’t already.

 

Get Involved: Engineering Managers Community

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If you manage technical teams, are looking to grow and learn and broaden your network — you might enjoy connecting with this community of peers from all around the world: Engineering Manager Slack.

I’ve enjoyed participating in the discussions around books, conferences, remote companies, and more. Useful to both get a new perspective once in a while as I’m exposed to fresh ideas outside my own company’s culture and norms. And also to get a zeitgeist feel of my industry, my “people.”

Co-organizer Cate’s put up a brief recap of the first year or so in New-ish Eng-Manager Slack, >1 Year On.

I believe in community, and the value of peer-mentoring, and it’s been great to create a space for that and have others value it too.

Join us!

Tester Easter Egg

This wonderful chart of WordPress contribution groups contains a perfect Easter egg for finding new QA / testers.

Just in time for 2017 WordCamp US contributor day.

Get Involved: WordPress App Testing

Want to contribute to WordPress apps on Android and iOS? If you aren’t a developer or designer, no worries, we need your help as a tester. Anyone and everyone is welcome to pitch in — all you need is a keen eye and a iOS or Android phone or tablet.

Head over to Make WordPress Mobile and subscribe to receive email updates. Notice certain posts are titled “Call for Testing” — that’s where you can jump in, read the testing notes, and test the new beta versions on your device.

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For both iOS and Android there’s a one-time step to join as a beta tester via TestFlight or Google Play Store. After you join, you’ll have access to download and use — and test — the latest and greatest versions of the WordPress apps before they are available to the public.

Help us make WordPress better on mobile!

P.S. WordPress is also now on desktop for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

ReactJS Introduction Workshop (Tucson)

On Saturday May 7, 2016 join Rincon Strategies—a Tucson, Arizona based web development shop and Tucson ReactJS organizers—for an in-depth workshop to learn how to build web applications with the popular JavaScript library React. (React is the main library running the new, open-source WordPress.com.)

Details and signup on Eventbrite. Hope to see you there.

SupConf

SupConf—a conference for folks who want to build a career in support—is coming in May 2016.

It’s time we think about support as more than just an entry-level job. Support is a career, a craft, and something to be proud of.

Pretty cool to see this type of focused conference come together around the craft of customer support.