I started work at Automattic 18 years ago today. Matt offered me a job working on a new WordPress based website a few weeks before. I had just bought a house the year before, I had become engaged the month before, and left my old job at the same time, so I jumped at the opportunity to work on WordPress full time!
It started out small with us working on 2 servers and an invite system. I felt I was doing as much admin on MySQL and Apache as coding. More people were hired. Many of them are still at Automattic. We worked on lots of cool little things like the global tag system, and so much else that I’ve forgotten about. Then moving onto the billing system because I had done billing at my previous job, then on to Crowdsignal, on to Jetpack Forms and finally onto the team working on Jetpack Boost and WP Super Cache.
WordPress.com is unrecognisable from what it was 18 years ago, but if I run “blame” on the right files, I’ll sure I’ll still see my name on some ancient code nobody has touched in all that time.
Fast forward 18 years, and I’m in the same office at home. I definitely made the right decision that day in 2005.
Thanks, Matt.
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Congrats Donn. That’s quite a wide ranging list of projects to be involved in and has changed the web. Just found the WordPress.com Golden Ticket email you sent me in September 2005!
Ah that’s so nice to hear. I always suspected Automattic was a great place to work and even considered applying for a position some times when times were tough at PixelApes. Funnily 2005 is when we founded PixelApes but we only lasted a bit over 10 years before we threw in the towel. A lot of that time was spent working with WordPress though and it served us very well until we started getting into more bespoke web apps, at which point I switched to Laravel. But after reviewing options for restarting my photoblog and blog, WordPress won out ?
Congratulations on this milestone!
Whoops, random question mark typo crept in there instead of a full stop ?
Oh commenting here via the Jetpack reader worked ?
What a journey, congrats Donncha!
Thank you!
Wow. I remember when I first heard of you being a fully remote worker, it seemed so weird and exotic, but you were blazing a trail! 😀