“Most developers are itching to be a part of their favorite projects. You do not scale, but by giving developers tools and getting out of their way, your project can. So please remember that when issues are reported on your open source project, you should not fix them. I hope this serves you well and would love to hear about your experiences and help any way I can.”
By Wesley Beary in “Less is More published Nov 27, 2011. Hat tip Jake Dahn.

A leader will always lead by being prepared to do the work themselves, but I’m really feeling what @geemus wrote.

It is in the ethos of the WordPress community, and the company, my former employer, Matt Mullenweg formed to support it. Here is my favorite part of the Automattic Creed:

“I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.”

I’m excited by the help I’m receiving from my new colleagues at Piston Cloud and the OpenStack community.

Pistoneers are kindred spirits of Automatticians. Before joining the Piston Cloud team I noted automation being a regular theme on “Our Team“.

This had nothing to do with our network providers, or data centers…
Matt Mullenweg, “Downtime“, WordPress.com Blog, June 14th, 2010

Doesn’t mean that our Systems Lead Barry Abrahamson isn’t going to do everything he can to make sure a similar event never happens again.

Barry is solid, and makes every link around him stronger.

I love working with that guy!

Taking a Matt Nap

In “The Way I Work, annotated” my boss Matt Mullenweg shares additional insights and linkifies his Inc. Magazine’s “The Way I Work” column (July issue). Both versions are excellent reads, but the post at ma.tt benefits from Matt answering a lot of additional questions in the comments.

Here is an excerpt from the article that inspired me to share this photo (emphasis mine):

“I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don’t need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours — folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I’ll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.”

A fast, distributed, horizontally scalable system built upon linux, php5.2, and mysql 5.1 wherein work can be stored in a database, and processed outside the flow of script execution. Examples of common things that are part of script execution but not necessary to the rendering of the response to the user might be spam scanning, statistical analysis, email notification sending, processing input data, etc. Also included is an equally distributed cron mechanism to remove single servers as a point of failure for scheduled jobs.

There are a lot of terms I like in there like fast, distributed, horizontally scalable, scheduled. It could probably benefit from robust and fault tolerant. Any others?

Anyway, this crontab-like system for PHP scripts is an essential part of our WordPress.com infrastructure, and I’m really excited to see it open sourced!

Check out code.trac.wordpress.org for other pieces of our puzzle that don’t have pretty project pages.

By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.

This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.

I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.

I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.

The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.

I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.

But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!

But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.

He has been with us for a couple of months, but yesterday he adopted that nickname in the channel, likely as a reflection of the playful nicknames that some of the other team members use.

eagleclaw: eagleclaw=hailin
eagleclaw: I used to (still) practice eagle claw, an style of ancient martial art

I met him on my recent trip to San Francisco, and he is as gentle, sincere, dedicated, intelligent, and playful in person as he is online.

It’s a pleasure working with you eagleclaw.

“In a team, would you be a turtle or a crab?”