Genericons Icon Font

Posted on Wed 27 Feb 2013 by Joseph Scott

Some of my great co-workers recently released a new icon font – Genericons

The details are in The Genericons Icon Font Story announcement post. In additional to being a nice general use icon font, it is licensed under GPLv2 (or later), so no more trying to sort out licensing terms to see if the icon font will jive with your existing open source projects. They are also free, as in no cost. The font is already in use in the new WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme ( demo site is at http://twentythirteendemo.wordpress.com/ ).

For more examples check out the bottom of the announcement post and genericons.com site.

Automattic in 2012

Posted on Tue 8 Jan 2013 by Joseph Scott

Matt posted about 2012 at Automattic, specifically how we hired 48 new people and are looking to hire around 60 more this year.

Having 48 new people in one year is amazing for me to see. That is four times the total head count of Automattic when I joined in 2007. Last year also saw Velda Christensen join Automattic, which doubled the number of Automatticians in Utah. :-)

Twenty twelve also brought new challenges for me as my focus at work shifted from Akismet (check out the crazy spam numbers in the spam vs. ham chart) to VaultPress. Looking forward to both services (along with the rest of Automattic) having a great 2013.

A New, New Focus: VaultPress

Posted on Mon 20 Aug 2012 by Joseph Scott

Two years ago I posted about “A New Focus“, where my time at Automattic adjusted to be centered on Akismet. Back then Akismet was catching 500,000,000 spam comments per month (see the sidebar chart at http://akismet.com/about/). Today it is catching just over 2,000,000,000 spam comments per month (with a peak of nearly 2,500,000,000 at the end of 2011). Even with all that growth Akismet has continued to perform well, maintaining a high level of accuracy and performance, something that has been great to be a small part of.

This summer I’ve been asked to shift my focus again, by joining the VaultPress team.

If you aren’t familiar with VaultPress here is the elevator pitch: “VaultPress syncs the data from your WordPress site (posts, pages, comments, plugin & theme files, and media uploads) as they are added. On top of that VaultPress will scan your files for code vulnerabilities and changes to core WordPress files.” (more details are on the Get to know VaultPress page)

VaultPress also provides a restore process. If your WordPress site gets vaporized for some reason doing a fresh install and activating the VaultPress plugin will allow VaultPress.com to push a backup snapshot back to your server. There is also an option to manually download a backup snapshot, if you just want to pull out something specific.

The last two years focused on Akismet have been great, and now it is exciting to be taking on the new challenge of helping VaultPress improve and grow.

Scott Berkun’s Next Book Subject: Automattic & WordPress.com

Posted on Thu 16 Aug 2012 by Joseph Scott

Scott Berkun has announced the topic for his next book:

The next book is based on the journal I kept while working at WordPress.com. It tells the story of what I learned working for one of the most amazing companies in the world.

Scott worked at Automattic for 2 years as one of the team leads working on WordPress.com.

This is the first time I’ve seen someone write a book about where I work. Automattic really is a special place and I look forward to reading Scott’s treatment of it.

The Joy of Deploy

Posted on Wed 11 Jul 2012 by Joseph Scott

Last week I started spending time on the VaultPress team at Automattic. VaultPress was something I hadn’t worked on previously and had only loosely followed, so the code base was something I wasn’t familiar with.

With my relatively fresh eyes (as far as not having worked on VaultPress before) I spent the first day or so just making observational notes about the service. Developers often suffer from having an intimate knowledge of a system, which can make it hard to picture how a regular user (who isn’t familiar with all the ins and outs) views things. This was my chance to avoid that before diving into the code base.

The next day, after assembling my notes, I started diving into VaultPress. Support, bug tickets, documentation, feature requests, code, the whole thing. I picked one of the very minor items from my notes and found the piece of code that needed to be updated. After running a few tests to make sure the change worked as expected, I committed and deployed the new code.

There is something magical about deploying code on a system that just a day or two ago you had never touched before. The joy of watching that first deploy (even for something simple) go live really gets you over that first hurdle of becoming comfortable with a new project.

A New Focus

Posted on Mon 26 Jul 2010 by Joseph Scott

In the three plus years I’ve been working at Automattic the company has grown quite a bit. The number of services has increased and there are over four times as many people. And the growth of WordPress.com has been amazing.

During that time I’ve worked in several areas; bug fixing, stats, themes, comments, rssCloud, PubSubHubbub, webhooks, the list goes on. Today starts a new focus for me at Automattic: Akismet. Most of my previous responsibilities are being transitioned to other people and teams.

So what will this change of focus mean? For now my responsibilities on Akismet will focus on public facing projects, like the Akismet WordPress plugin for instance.

I’ve been a happy user of Akismet for many years, now being able to work on such a critical product is very exciting.