Jess Boctor

Tag: Automattic

  • Farewell A8c

    On Wednesday, my role at Automattic was included in the workforce restructuring which was announced. I was separated from the company.

    While I don’t have much to say about how I was separated from Automattic, I have so much gratitude for my time with the company. More than I could ever fit in a single post. Automattic has been a support through some of the biggest transitions of my life. I became a mom, had a second child, stepped fully into being a developer, and moved across the United States. So much would have been drastically different about those experiences without the support of working at Automattic.

    More than the support of the company, I am grateful for the connections I have made. There are so many people and precious memories which I have from the last 6 years.

    Hobbes welcomed me with open arms and showed me the ropes. I am so thankful for each one of you 🍓 🍓 🍓

    Shilling, thank you for welcoming me and raising me up from a baby dev to where I am today. I know I have said most of this to each one of you, already, but I learned so much from you all. Not just how to write code, but how to be a better human. I hope that when you find unintentional easter-eggs, it brings a smile to your face. Thanks for always being willing to go along with my crazy meetup schemes. You were the best for playing along.

    There are so many people, teams, and orgs of Automattic that impacted my time there. I wouldn’t be able to name them all without forgetting someone, so I will just stop here.

    If I could offer any advice to everyone affected by this change, it would be to only hold on to what serves you. There is a process to grieving, but don’t get stuck in it. Take the good things forward, the lessons, the memories, the connections. Let the rest fall behind you when they aren’t helpful anymore.

    So what’s next? My ideation has kicked up a few things:

    • Write a novel about a certain dev team which gets sucked into the world of Fae and saves it because writing code isn’t that different from writing spells, right?
    • Start an online bartering marketplace and make money selling shipping labels
    • Create a meetup consultancy to plan retreats for groups of 5 – 14 people

    If your interested in staying in touch, feel free to contactme[at]jessboctor.com.

  • When Snarky Doesn’t Play

    So I just had an interesting experience at work.

    My team is getting ready for a meetup. In preparation for our gathering, each team member is ordering custom Yeti Ramblers.

    We decided to put our team name on one side and whatever custom text each team member wants on the other side. The second print is to make it easy to identify who the bottle belongs to in a sea of swag bottles.

    My team, known as Hobbes, has a friendly rivalry with another team in our division, Sparta. In reality, we all get along really well and enjoy helping one another out.

    That doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of teasing and one-upmanship displayed in the form of GIFs and memes.

    So of course, I thought to further this through my swag bottle. My concept for the design was to use the logical operator ! in my custom print. The bottle should have looked like this:

    Essentially, I wanted the bottle to read Hobbes NOT Sparta

    When placing the order, I noticed some weird behavior on the website and thought it strange that there was no mention of my custom design in the order summary. But full of faith in Yeti’s web development team, I placed the order anyways.

    A couple of days later, after noticing my bottle shipped much faster than my teammates, I asked them what their order confirmations looked like.

    It seems that I am being shipped a blank bottle.

    Curious as to what happened and how I managed to order the bottle without the design, I went back to the customizer.

    Turns out my snark broke their customizer

    Feeling a little exasperated that I couldn’t get my custom design to get added to the cart in either Chrome or Firefox, I began to troubleshoot. That’s when it hit.

    I thought I had to be mistaken at first. In my mind, there was no way that including the logical operator ! in the design it would break things.

    But it did.

    As soon as I removed the offending character, the customizer works as expected. A teammate tested and let me know that by adding another character in front of the !, the customizer works as well.

    I made a video of running through both design creations:

    Go to https://d.pr/v/YfuBaM to watch the video

    Consider the lesson learned. Snark doesn’t always play.

    Also, anyone have a contact for the dev team at Yeti?

    Adventure on.