2017 Automattic Grand Meetup

Another Automattic Grand Meetup has come and gone. It is always such an amazing, overwhelming, stressful, fun, exciting, unique, and tiring experience. This year was no exception to that.

Shortly before the meetup the team I’m on added three new people. That is exciting, always fun to get to meet and hangout with more awesome Automatticians. However this made our team fairly big and with more people going to be hired soon we split our team in half. That’s the sad part 🙁 Some of this wonderful group of people I’ve gotten to know are now moving on to form their own team. They’ll certainly thrive as a team and individuals, but still tough knowing we won’t be working quite as close together and on the next team meetup they won’t be with us. Luckily we were still able to spend time together this trip.

Another first for this meetup is the first one Jen was coming along too. Getting to work and travel so closely with her is another one of the things I’ll never take for granted working with Automattic. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time together because we are on different teams and the week is so busy, but we made the most of the time we did have. In the beginning we made sure our flight was in early enough that we were able to go visit the water front in Vancouver and made our way to a beach as well. The day before we had left home we went to the shore here and Jen put her feet in the ocean. We did the same thing the very next day except in the Pacific! We also got in some walks in the mornings, chats at night before we both exhaustively fell on our pillows, and with big group we took the gondola up to the top of the Whistler mountains!

We took most of my old team, some of Jen’s team, and one of my buddies from when I first joined the company. Couldn’t ask for a better group to share this experience with. We took the Peak to Peak Gondola trip which takes you up the mountain, then across to a neighbouring peak, then back down again. The views, the air, and the company were all 💯!

Getting to share meals, work, and a new home room concept with all my colleagues, allowed me to meet many new people I hadn’t yet. My Meetamattician score is at a high of 52% of the company being met. Some of those were pretty quick conversations though.

This year I was particularly nervous as we were trying to keep support open for our customers at a much larger scale than we ever had in the past. We had many Happiness Engineers doing their regular job for part of the meetup, and a whole host of others throughout the company join us as well. We started and finished the week in great shape thanks to all their hard work. It was such a cool experience having everyone pull together and work in person.

Being part of this company leaves me thankful just about every day. There are stressful parts, and parts that aren’t always so fun, but the people, the work, and the company all make it so worth while. Can’t wait to find out where we will get together next year to do it all over again!