He has long done much of the design work on WordPress.org, WordPress.com, and the sites for most of our other projects.

Over the couple of weeks, I’ve noticed a large number of image and CSS WordPress development tickets (with fixes!) from iammattthomas. I don’t remember him being so involved in a release previously, so I asked him:

I’d never so much as submitted a ticket before Feb. 18. But I knew it was going to take a lot of OCD-level tweaking to get the admin to match as perfectly as possible the Happy Cog designs, so I jumped in. The only downside of that is now I’m simultaneously redesigning WordPress.org while constantly writing patches for the admin UI.

MT has great taste, is fun to work with, and is a wonderful person. I’m so happy he’s on my team!

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.