I’ve been on the periphery of the open source WordPress community for years now. I’ve attended one local WordPress meetup, one WordCamp, and I even helped design and produce a book about WordPress. Here at Automattic, the open source community is always close by. But up until a couple weeks ago, I’d never contributed directly…

Don’t forget – no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell. —Charles de Lint Ever since I first joined Woo, nearly 6 years ago, I always felt a sense of satisfaction working in support, knowing that I was helping enable…

In the early days of my career, I was quite fascinated with Flash. I wanted to be a cartoonist growing up so naturally, I was drawn to this tool that allowed me to create some pretty powerful animations. Over time, I learned it extensively, until it eventually became my expertise. I’ve built several full-Flash websites,…

Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of people who use websites for all kinds of different things — fashion blogs, online portfolios, e-commerce stores, etc. Regardless of the type or purpose, there’s one common thing amongst all successful websites —TRUST. In business, trust can take many different forms and the more efficient you…

Search for and tell stories about people, not just data. Two months ago, I was invited by one of Jetpack’s engineering teams to join their week-long team meetup in Madrid, Spain. Most of our days involved the usual talks and workshops around the work we do day-to-day, but we dedicated one of our meetup days…

Theme designers at Automatic have a very important job — design themes, that will (potentially) be used by millions of people. But more importantly, these themes will represent our customers, or their businesses, to the world. This is a very exciting, and intimidating task. But how do you create a theme for millions, you ask?…

Simplicity builds trust. At Automattic we’ve been working through some overarching design principles to help guide our work. One of these core principles is that “simplicity builds trust.” Basically, the idea that the more straightforward a task is to do, the more confident a user is in their ability (or the product’s ability) to do…

Have you ever had to sit and watch someone struggle to do something on a computer or phone? They keep clicking the wrong thing or looking in the wrong place, pushing the wrong buttons, or using the wrong gestures. It’s a frustrating experience for everyone involved. My patience has grown with experience. Particularly in helping…

Stories are integral to human history and culture. Before we had written language, we had stories imprinted on the walls of caves with pigments made of ochre and soot. Before we had agriculture, we developed rich tapestries of myth, folklore, and legend. We use stories to teach, to entertain, to delight, to think through problems,…