Happy Birthday Caile

September is a busy month in our house for Birthday’s. There’s Noah, my Father In Law, Alexandria, and today is Caile’s day! My little Caile turns eleven today.

She’s growing into a wonderful person with a great sense of humor, compassion, and a little smarty pants as well. Tonight when we were driving together and she was teaching me a bit of French. It’s almost pumpkin people time here and they are starting to set them up, but none of them have any heads yet. So she was teaching me sentences and conjugating verbs. Sentences like these:

Il n’a pas une tête (He doesn’t have a head). Je ne ai pas une tête (I don’t have a head). Il a une grosse tête (He has a big head). Il avait une tête (He had a head).

She thought I was pretty strange asking how to say all these different sentences and figured I probably wouldn’t ever be able to use them. Ha, I showed her, I used them in this post.

She’s also more organized than me. The other day we were rushing out the door to go meet the rest of the family. As we were driving she asked me, why are we rushing? It was 10:20, so I told her, we need to be there for 10:30 we’re going to be late. She laughed at me, it doesn’t start till 11:00. Guess who was right.

Happy eleventeenth birthday Caile!

Love What You Do

It’s coming up on the one year mark from when I started my Trial with Automattic and I’ve been working full time here for about ten months now. Looking back on my past jobs and places I’ve worked I really don’t remember a time where at this point I wasn’t looking for other opportunities. Not this time. There isn’t any part of me that wants to be looking to move anywhere else. When I realized this I thought I should sit and think about what makes this company so different for me.

There are the obvious things that you can see when you read the benefits on the Work With Us page, and although those go to show that they do value you as an employee and want to keep you happy, that is really only a small part of it for me.

One of the biggest things for me is that I’m doing something I really am passionate about. Helping people get online. The mission of WordPress in general is to democratize publishing. That is a short statement but very powerful. The goal is to make the same opportunity to have your message available online to everyone. WordPress already goes a long way to make this happen, but there is still along way to go as well. Automattic is dedicated to working towards this. Whether it is by offering the free plan to everyone on WordPress.com, working on getting the software available in many more languages, or by dedicating as much time and effort as we do contributing to the open source project.

One of the things that really makes me proud to be a part of is when it come to freedom of speech. If everyone is going to have the same opportunity to publish their views, that is going to end up including people who have views you don’t agree. Automattic goes above and beyond to fight for the rights of all people using the service. One example of this is scoring perfect on the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Who has your back report. You can see some other examples on our transparency reports Hall of Shame.

Even though we all work remotely and I’ve only met a handful of my co-workers in person so far, the people that get hired here are amazing people. The hiring team and process do a great job to make sure the people hired are going to be a good fit.

When I was sick and in the hospital I received many well wishes. A co-worker from Scotland had a lovely plant delivered to me  and my team sent flowers as well. This in addition to everyone letting me know not to worry about anything. Take as much time as I needed and things would be covered. They were genuinely concerned with me getting better.

That’s an example of when something major happens and everyone showing their support. This also goes on in little ways every day. Everyone is willing to take the time needed to help you solve a problem, work something out, or even listen to you vent about something work related or even something outside of work that has you frazzled. The support I see given to me and to everyone else is outstanding.

A lot of these things come back to the Automattic Creed which I’ve previously written about. People here believe in and and live it.

I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.

When I did my Trial I had a Buddy, a full time employee who would be with me through the process to help me in what ever way they could. It meant a lot to have someone you knew you could count on to ask anything. I’ve been a buddy to a few new employees who were doing a support rotation after they were first hired, but currently I have my first Trial Buddy. It is exciting that now I get to be the person to help pass on the things I’ve learned to someone else in this bit more formal way.

I will never stop learning.

That’s the first line in the creed. There is so much to learn here in general, let alone that it is in the tech industry which is always evolving and changing. There is no way I could ever get bored unless I purposely avoided trying to learn new things. Automattic helps make this possible as well. Reimbursing for books, courses, and encouraging learn-ups between co-workers.

Trust. From the minute you’re hired you have the same access to everything as every one else. You’re free to make decisions and do what you feel is right. As a Happiness Engineer most of that centers around ensuring what you’re doing is best for the person I’m working with, or the people in general who use our products.

Automattic values their employee’s happiness and well being as well. That’s why there is so much flexibility left in terms of schedules and vacation policy. It comes back to being trusted as well. Recently I approached our Events Sponsorship manager with not much notice about us supporting an upcoming local conference BlogJam. She made it work and we were able to help out the conference. This is great for me as it is the first year it is running and selfishly I want to make sure everything goes well so it can be around for more years and just get larger and better.

Just the other day I was reminded in another way the value us when a co-worker was doing a support rotation, where one week you give up your usual role and spend it doing support instead. It is similar to the first three weeks when anyone is hired. They were working doing live chat and one of the users was abusive, intolerant, and making just rotten comments in general. When the lead of our Happiness group found out about this he personally refunded this person all the money they had paid us for services and emailed them directly letting them know with such an interaction they were better off not being a customer with us and asked them to move their services elsewhere.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this done, but it really shows they value all the employees and aren’t going to allow someone just because they are paying to treat people here like that. Luckily this is not a common occurrence as the vast majority of people I interact with are no where near like that and appreciative of the support they receive.

This ended up being a bit longer than I expected, but if you’re still with me think you and Automattic would be a good match, we’re hiring, come work with me.

Choosing Nova Scotia For Now

There has been much written about the state of things in Nova Scotia, and studies showing that things need to change now before it is too late for the Province. The topic has been on my mind for some time but reading the article this morning Rural Reckoning: Being young and looking for a future finally prompted me to write something my self.

The article is not ground breaking it’s a story we’ve heard over and over again, young people over and over again getting educated here and then having to leave to put that education to work. This article from a couple years ago Saying farewell to Nova Scotia for a reason has stuck with me, and this one looking at the Maritimes in general: How the Maritimes became Canada’s incredible shrinking region.

Luckily there are people who choose to to live here in Nova Scotia and come to make it work regardless if it is easy to do so or not. The Bluenosers by choice initiative showcases some of these stories. While I wasn’t born here in Nova Scotia I am from the Maritimes and have lived here most of my life. While I do love it really the one main thing that keeps me here is Family. Both my wife’s and my parents are both here and we both have siblings here. My kids are all in school and have made friends so to move them would be challenging, although each of them said they would move without much hesitation.

While we are fine here it is mainly because my wife is self employed and I have looked beyond the traditional employment options in the area and now work remotely with the distributed company Automattic. When I think of my kids and their future here I do get a little worried. While I do believe there will be more and more opportunities as technology advances and more companies begin to embrace the opportunity to have a remote workforce it still isn’t there for everyone by any means. Books like Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp and Scott Berkuns The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work both illustrate two companies who are great examples of how this can work.

My honest belief is that for this Province to be sustainable it is going to take more remote type work and local entrepreneurs to create businesses here. The downfall for remote work here is that because of the shrinking tax base there has to be a different reason for you to want to live here. It’s not attractive for new entrepreneurs or remote workers to specifically set out to move here. We are one of the highest taxed Provinces in Canada and the level of services we receive for it don’t match that of elsewhere.

Nova Scotia has long wait times for health care. Our roads and infrastructure are deteriorating. Recently I went for a drive out past my old family home while taking my daughter to work at a well known large retail store. It started out in this rural location but has since grown to many locations elsewhere. The drive out there was appalling and I don’t know how the business owner hasn’t lost their minds. Each road, no matter the direction you take, leading to their place of business, where they employ a number of people and must bring revenue to the local area, are reverting back to dirt. Apparently the roads were so bad they were dug up, but instead of repaving them, the laid gravel down instead. So now you are driving along and hit dirt/gravel roads all of a sudden.

On my drive out there I immediately thought of this article by Nova Scotia’s previous finance Minister. In it explains basically that we don’t have the population to support paying for all the roads we have paved over the years. So especially our rural roads are going to end up falling a part and go back to dirt. For major highways we are going to have to move to a toll and pay per use system in order to afford to have them.

Then there is our health care system. There are still many families in rural areas here where they don’t have a family doctor. Wait times are long for procedures and people end up going to emergency rooms for things that they could regularly see a family physician for. So with a system already strained it is causing Doctors who are here to leave. They can go elsewhere, likely make more money, with less stress.

With the high taxes and the services we do have going down hill it is going to be hard to attract people to want to move here. Those of us who do stay are going to have to pay a premium for living here. At some point even families like mine who does love it here and values being close to family are going to have to make the decision. Is the benefits of living here worth the cost? For now at least they are. But as my kids get even older and get to the point where they are going to start their own lives and careers it might not be here. Maybe we’ll want to get them settled into an area where I can see an easier road to success for them before they reach that point.

It’s my honest hope that this doesn’t happen. But if my kids grow up and feel the need to move away from their home Province, my main reason of being here for family won’t be as valid anymore.

Week Six Summary

It’s been coming for a while, but this was the first week where I didn’t do any evening workouts. My big change this week was I started actually keeping track of my eating. Counting calories is no fun and I’m sure I’m not really accurate, but I did track everything I ate and used best guesses with the help of the My Fitness Pal app.

My goal was to eat 1600 calories a day and I was able to average that for the whole week. There were some days where I was a little below that but others where I was a little above. The funny thing is, leaving last week out of it, this is pretty much the same way I’ve been eating all along. Previously I just didn’t track it.

Counting calories always confuses me anyway. In My Fitness Pal it gives you your goal calories and that is what I tried to stay close to. But then if you had exercise it it basically gets you to eat more calories. Is that right? I just kept eating the original goal and trying to stay close to that number.

My running wasn’t great this week. I only got in four days of running. I did try a couple of short days where I only ran a couple of kilometers but tried to do it fast. One day isn’t shown in the image below, because my technology wasn’t working great, but I’m pretty sure I kept a sub 5 min/km pace for the two kilometers. Yesterday I was able to get in another 10k run. It’s looking like my 10k pace is going to stick around 6:00 min/km but I’m hoping I can lower that a bit in the next couple weeks.

Results:

Last week: 201lbs
Now: 197lbs
Lost: 4lbs

It feels really good to get below the 200lb mark again and to see the scale actually go down again too. It really confuses me though because really I’m confident I ate about the same as previous weeks but worked out less and now my weight is starting to go down again. It’s all very strange to me, but I’ll take it. I’ve conceded that I won’t hit my goal weight in my desired time frame, but I’m going to keep pushing forward anyway. Two weeks left and 12lbs to hit the goal I wanted. I might come pretty close but 6lbs a week at this point is a lot of weight to lose.

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Here’s the day that I had the technology issues. Not completely accurate but I still went fast 🙂

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Sweet Sixteen

In just a few more hours it will officially be Alexandria’s sixteenth birthday. My baby girl is growing up so fast it’s crazy. My birthday’s are one thing to make me feel older, but when think that she is now old enough that she can get her license and drive a car it is overwhelming. Where did the years go? They seem so fast and yet so long at the same time.

Today we started the celebration. She had a couple ideas of what she wanted to do for her actual birthday party with her friends. A few years back the movie Hotel Transylvania came out right around her birthday and she and some friends went to see it. As it turns out the sequel  to it just came out and she almost choose that for her party with her friends. Ultimately she decided something else so instead we went as a family to see it today. It was a pretty cute and funny movie. Jen and I laughed as much as anyone else I’d say.

Alexandria you have grown into a beautiful woman and I love you very much. Stop growing up on me already though, I’m not ready to have you getting this old.

Public Speaking

Like many, or most people public speaking is a bit of a phobia of mine. It’s not one that I can’t get over, but certainly not something I enjoy. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had to get up in front of people but that’s going to change soon.

Over the past little bit I’ve had a few offers to talk about WordPress in particular, I’ve never come out and given straight answer on whether I would do it or not. Deep down I want to be able to these sorts of things but it is just so uncomfortable. So I leave the door open but never come right out and jump in.

That’s going to end soon. It’s good to get out your comfort zone and do things that are hard, it will help me grow. The first time coming up will kind of force me into it. At our coming all company get together each of us will do a flash talk. It can be pretty short and about any topic we want so that makes it easier, but it is still in front of a bunch of people most of who I have never met before.

I’m also going to commit to doing a talk at our local Refresh Annapolis Valley meetup that we do once a month. The organizer of the new WordPress meetup in Halifax has helped me work out a good topic for me to talk about at a future event there as well.

Hopefully when I get a few of these under my belt I’ll feel better about doing it more often. Talking about and helping people with WordPress is something I really enjoy doing either one on one or in small groups. If I can do that with even more people it will be even better.

Technology Woes

Most of the time technology and I get along really well. Much of my time is spent working with technology and helping others use it. That’s the way I like it, me being the one to figure something out and help someone else use it. When it goes the other way and technology doesn’t work the way I expect it to, right or wrong, and I can’t figure out how to make it work I get frustrated.

Today I took a break from work to go for a run. My running companions are my iPhone with the Runkeeper app and my Pebble watch. Obviously I can and should run without these things, and just go for the enjoyment. However I love tracking and working to improve my running. Whether it’s to go faster or to go further or both. Being able to do better than I did before is a big motivator for me. Runkeeper does the hard work of tracking everything and while I’m running it displays how long I’ve been running, my average pace, and my distance.

Usually this whole process works perfect, today however and a few times in the past, the information doesn’t show up on my watch. Usually I don’t notice because I start my run and put my phone in my pocket and start out. It’s usually a little bit later when I look at my wrist to see and get my pace where I want it. Today my goal was to try and keep a pace of 5:00 min/km for as long as I could. I felt like I was running blind when I couldn’t easily see and keep track.

After my first km I stopped and tried to get it figured out. There is no reason I can figure out that causes this to not work when it does. Everything is still connected I was receiving email notifications right before I started. A big part of it is likely because I don’t fully understand how the connection works and how things need to be setup. It just usually works and I don’t worry about it. I tried restarting both the watch and the phone, disconnecting bluetooth and setting it back up again.

Finally after trying these things a few times I got it to work and started to go again. This time the problem seemed to be with Runkeeper though. The run it tracked showed further than I really went and as a result my pace was crazy fast. For a while it was showing 2:15 min/km which obviously wasn’t right. I ran another km anyway and then stopped and gave up on the run for today.

If anything though this helps me relate to the people I talk with each day. When one of them is displaying frustration trying to use something I’m glad that I’m able to help them figure things out and get things working for them.

Jen has Started Blogging

Over the years I’ve tried a few times to get Jen to start blogging. Maybe if I had ever kept it up for a solid amount of time myself she would have been more inclined to start. Maybe this time I’ve kept with it long enough that she’s giving it a shot.

She’s still working on it but she has it looking good and has a few posts up. She is using it similar to I am as a type of journal to keep track of the things we do. I tend to throw in some other things every once in a while but if you end up following both our blogs you’ll certainly get some overlap. One of the great things about blogging though is that even writing about the same topic each person is different so you’ll get a different perspective.

So without anymore preamble her site is http://dreamofsummer.com take a look, give a follow.

Pumpkin Planting and Picking

Back in the beginning of June we made, what has become our annual trip to Ross Farm Museum to take part in the Pumpkin planting weekend. It’s a great event where you can go and plant your own pumpkin seed in their fields. They put a large number of stakes in the ground in rows and each person gets a number. This year we were in the high 500’s, so it’s a popular event.

We always enjoy visiting this museum anyway and get an annual family pass so we can visit when ever we want. I’ve written before about the Maple Syrup Weekend they do.

This past weekend was when you could come back to “pick” your pumpkins. It is more like pick up your pumpkins because they do a lot of the clean up and make sure that everyone has a pumpkin, because inevitably I’m sure not everyone’s seeds actually grows, and even if they did each plant produces more than one pumpkin. So they detach all the pumpkins and remove all the plants from the field and make sure each post has a pumpkin waiting for you to come get it.

This year they made it even better than before because the provided wagons and wheel barrows that you can use to carry the pumpkins from back in the field out to your vehicle. I still ended up with the task of making three trips to the car carrying the four pumpkins because of the large group of friends that came the wagon we took only held a few of the pumpkins.

Luckily I only carried one the whole way from the field because most of the people took a horse wagon ride to the field and then back closer to the entrance. Then I just had to carry the other three from there out to the parking lot.

Besides picking up the pumpkins the kids also enjoyed stopping by the cottage where they had baked some molasses cookies to sample. The other highlight was something they don’t get to do every visit, but they were able to milk a cow this  time.

Planting the Pumpkins back in June:

Our trip back to get the pumpkins:

Photo Bloopers

The other day I was trying to take a picture of Jen and Noah after his birthday party. It turned into a bit of a hilarious disaster and I just kept taking pictures as it happened. The two of them were falling all over the place and laughing. Caile was trying to jump in and photo bomb them but you can only catch her leg in one.

It ended with a nice picture though so it was worth it.

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