Completing A Year As A Happiness Engineer At Automattic

This day, last year (on the 4th of April, 2016, that is), I officially started working for Automattic, as a Happiness Engineer. Yes, I just completed my first year in my dream job!

And, what a year it was!

Over the past year, I:

• Learned a LOT more about WordPress, and WooCommerce.
• Helped several hundred (or, maybe, even a few thousand) customers using WooCommerce accomplish what they wanted, with their stores (and, of course, made them happy!)
• Wrote a 151 Posts, and 199 comments in our internal blogs, or P2‘s, as we call them (being a company that runs the most popular website creation platform, and blogging tool, it’s not surprising that we communicate through blogs!)
• Sent 13,559 messages in Slack.
• Travelled to four countries – The USA, Canada, Germany, and Portugal – on work meetups! (Ended up having a lot more fun too!)
• Danced like no one’s watching – yes, on a work meetup!
• Worked from a lot of places – from investigating into a troublesome issues with the USPS Shipping Method extension from my comfortable king-size bed at our apartment, to sending a pull request in GitHub to fix a bug with our WooCommerce Shipment Tracking extension, while lounging in a hammock, sipping a glass of mojito – enjoying an amazing view of the sea.
• Realized that I didn’t have stage fright, any more! Shared about my journey to Automattic with four-hundred-odd colleagues from 60 countries, at Whistler, Canada during our Grand Meetup, spoke at a 300-strong Audience on leveraging WordPress for Startups, at WordCamp Nashik, regularly spoke (mostly impromptu) at events, and even trained engineering students on WordPress…
• Relished some of the best cuisines in the world – my favourite yet being those yummy Briskets in Barbeque sauce, from Texas!
• Became friends with some amazing people from all across the world, whom I’m proud to call my colleagues!
• Co-organized my own WordCamp – WordCamp Kochi 2017 – which turned out to be a grand success.

Yes, my first year at Automattic, has been nothing short of eventful, and fun – and I’m sure all of my colleagues will agree with me about how exciting, and fun this job is! I consider it my privilege that I landed this job – not just because of the cool perks it offers, but also for the chance it offers to work with WordPress (which, for me, is more of an overwhelming passion, than just a web publishing software), and to change the face of the web, not to mention the opportunity to directly create an impact on real people!

It’s one of the best things I’ve ever had in my entire life, and I won’t be exaggerating when I say that this job changed my life, as I knew it! I take this opportunity to thank Automattic for giving me this opportunity. Looking forward to being a part of this journey for as long as it takes (even for the rest of my working life).

I’m sure you’d wanna hear more about Automattic, and my journey to this company, but that’s for another day, and another (long) blog post (watch this space!). But for now, here’s a friendly heads-up that we’re always hiring!