A major relaunch of WordPress.com

A big congratulations to the entire team at Automattic for launching a brand new version of WordPress.com today. It’s the culmination of 18 months of work, built on a completely new tech stack, and an example of how big of a job it is to reinvent yourself when you’re in the middle of running a service for millions of people.

post-illustration.png

The first version of WordPress.com did an amazing job for the last 10 years, growing from its humble beginnings to an incredible scale of serving billions of page views a month. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the rise of many new technologies, including smart phones, tablets, JavaScript, Github, and API driven architectures. The new WordPress.com is designed to take advantage of all of them and serve WordPress users for many years to come.

Update: Om has a great post with further details.

Office optional

Because of my work at Automattic, I often get asked questions about distributed companies. The idea of organizing a company so that employees can work from anywhere in the world is clearly gaining steam. When a company is distributed, functions that are traditionally office centric, like meetings, job interviews, or all hands, get reinvented to happen online and offices become optional in the process. Geographic limitations fall away and teams can collaborate in new ways that fully embrace a global talent pool. Automattic is now around 400 distributed employees strong and continues to help blaze the trail for this new way of working together. Here’s a collection of articles that dive into various aspects of running a company like Automattic: