Karen Alma

Back in June I wrote about building a personal operations system with Claude Code. I got asked this week how it’s going, so here’s an update. TL;DR: it’s a work in progress and I’m still making tweaks.

When I started it, I thought I wanted a tool to show me everything I had going on: every Slack mention, every meeting, and every email. It worked… way too well. The list grew faster than I could clear it only to find it stale again a week later. So essentially, I felt like I was working for the tool and it was an extra task on my list, which is exactly NOT what I wanted.

In my current role, there are things I just need to be aware of but don’t need an action on my part, so I tried sorting things into buckets: what I need to act on and what I just need to know. I’d have Claude run that every morning so I could see what was on my list and what I should know about. That’s been helping tame the chaos.

Then I noticed Claude was making weird decisions about what ended up on my list. My favorite: it drafted my weekly update saying I was spending three days in New York for a team AI enablement session. I was going to New York, but the event Claude referenced had been cancelled, the dates had changed, and I was going for an entirely different reason. It had found an old calendar entry and confidently built a whole story around it. I caught it, and it wasn’t a huge deal since it was only for my own awareness, but it really highlighted that I’m, at the end of the day, the editor.

Where I am now: every morning my morning brief routine reads my calendar, meeting notes, Slack, and sent mail fresh each time. I archived the old giant list and started over with a shorter one I picked myself. I get a short message that’s gotten much better at highlighting the top things I need to ship that day, and who’s waiting on me. The goal is to wrangle all my different focus areas into one place, and it’s getting better at that. It’s also gotten better at seeing patterns and making connections between them.

What I didn’t expect

Along the way I got better at using Claude for everything else. I think through hard problems with it, especially when there are a lot of sources that I need to pull together, which may take some deep research and analysis. I build things I used to wait on someone else for: a CRM that flags updates from my email and Slack every morning, a community events dashboard to see what’s happening across a huge global landscape, and even migrated a website for a non-profit I work with from another platform over to WordPress. I have it check work against rules I’ve set, like reviewing invoices against contracts before I approve them. My memory files are shared across Claude Code, Cowork, and chat, so whichever one I open already knows my people and my projects.

Overall, it’s working. It started as a way to keep track of my work, and it’s turned into the place where a lot of my work happens. Let’s see where I’m at in another 5 months!

My current work involves a lot of context switching and incorparates a bunch of incoming information everyday: two Slack workspaces, email, calendar, internal P2s (blogs), and meetings. The most fragile piece in this chain is me. It’s a lot to keep up and and if I’m relying on me retyping it into a tracker or writing it into a task list, context is lost and relies on just me and my brain. 

My brain is pretty useful, but if you add in my non-work obligations, there is a lot of space for human error.

I’d been using Claude in chat and Cowork to think through problems. It’s useful, but everything goes in one direction with me asking and Claude answering. What I needed was something that did the looking for me and helped me prioritize.

So I opened Claude Code for the first time.

And what ensued was a personal operations system that lives on my laptop built through conversations and no code I wrote myself.

Every task has buttons for pin, mark urgent, mark done, move to another section, delegate. Each click rewrites the source markdown directly.

I started with just the vaguest idea, I was looking to Claude Code to help me diagnose and plan. From there, each addition came from a frustration or a gap I noticed:

1. Markdown task list, sectioned by strategic priority.
2. Morning scan ingesting four sources, writing a queue.
3. Auto-archive of ticked items into a dated Done section.
4. Web app, so I could see everything without opening Obsidian.
5. Watcher to catch silent failures of the scan.
6. Per-section quick-add for inline capture.
7. Section moves and delegation from the dashboard.
8. Mobile access via Tailscale.

The first iteration was just an .md file in Claude. I had to tell Claude when I checked something off. Then we moved to Obsidian because that gave me a surface I could actually interact with and actually check things off my list. Then we moved to a browser page that does all the thinking so any action I take on the page is updated in the tool.

The most recent addition was that I realized I could be looking at this on my phone, which is sometimes less distracting since I wouldn’t have other things going on in the background. I had no idea how to accomplish this so I asked Claude and it gave me a suggestion to set up Tailscale — a free private mesh network that lets my own devices reach each other. Now the dashboard loads on my phone from a saved icon on my home screen. Amazing!

I didn’t write code. I described what I wanted and Claude built it. I said what felt wrong and Claude adjusted. When something broke, I described the symptom and Claude diagnosed. Amazing!

I first heard about the Johari window on Smarter Every Day, Destin Sandlin’s YouTube channel. What intrigues me about it is how it forces you to remember that even though we live inside our own skin and our own brain every day, we don’t actually know everything about ourselves. Sometimes other people can see things more clearly than we can.

The hard part is that it’s genuinely difficult for people to be honest with you about what they see in you that you don’t see in yourself. I can count on one hand the people in my life who I can really hear that kind of feedback from non-defensively, and unsurprisingly, those same people are the ones I can return the favor to. That kind of trust requires trust in both directions.

I spent some time talking to Claude about the “known to self / not known to others” quadrant because I was a bit fuzzy on it. They call it the facade, and I thought it was more about putting on a fake front, but then I realized it’s about the stuff you know about yourself and choose not to share. Private thoughts, fears, opinions, the interior life that we keep to ourselves. So, we can grow the “known to self/known to others” quadrant in two directions. Others tell you what they see (telling you what you don’t know), and you tell others what you know about yourself (helping them understand you more).

Which got me thinking: Claude probably knows more about me at this point than almost anyone else. I use it every day at work for thought processing, drafting, organizing messy information, and working through decisions before I land on them. And on the personal side, I use it for volunteer board minutes, sympathy notes, travel planning, even sorting through my watercolor strategy. I’m trusting by nature, so I suspect I shrink that facade quadrant more than most people do, at least with a really smart computer that isn’t going to judge me. Unless that’s something that sits in the known to others and not known to me‽

It raises a strange question the original Johari window never had to answer: does an AI count as “others”? Pretty sure it doesn’t. But it’s an interesting thought exercise and made me think about what disclosure is actually for. That act of putting something into words, to someone who listens, is how you start to see it more clearly yourself.

Then there’s that whole fourth quadrant: the unknown unknowns. The stuff you don’t know about yourself and no one else knows either. Destin thinks that’s the territory God knows, and as a Christian I agree. I keep trying to think of what might be in that box, but I guess that’s the point. If I knew, it wouldn’t be unknown. The best we can do is hope that anything in there will be revealed in time.

I’ve been thinking about this in my work too. Turns out, communities have Johari windows too. The only way to shrink those areas which others know and you don’t is to have people you trust enough to tell you what they see. And maybe the facade matters there too: communities only really open up when the people in them feel safe enough to say what they actually think.

Being new to the the Automattic .Org team meant WordCamp Asia was an extension of my onboarding: a chance to rediscover everything WordCamp, reconnect with the community, and meet the people behind the projects.

I flew in ready to help staff the Career Corner booth alongside my colleague Pam Kocke from the Talent team, and pitch in wherever I could with the organizing team. And I left with my Notes app full of ideas and so much energy from being around thousands of people who love what they do.

WordCamp Asia 2026 was huge! Final ticket sales landed at 2,645, with 2,285 attendees actually walking the floor. It was a reminder of how big and alive the WordPress community is across the region. The official WCAsia 2026 wrap-up post has the full recap if you want to know more.

The moment that sticks with me: two girls from YouthCamp came by with their mom and asked some of the sharpest questions I’ve heard about building a future around WordPress. They wanted to know how to engage with WordPress as a product so that they could be in the community and eventually be contributors. Young community members, growing up inside the project. So cool to see.

A few other standout moments, all of which should be findable on the official schedule:

Mahangu’s data talk — a clear-eyed look at what the numbers are actually telling us about the ecosystem.

Maciej’s education panel — our team’s contribution to the conversation about how WordPress shows up in schools and universities. We signed on to the WP Credits contract with a cohort of 16 universities across India — another step for how WordPress shows up in formal education. More on the broader education initiatives is being tracked on make.WordPress.org.

Mary’s AMA — candid, genuine, and exactly what an AMA should be. When Matt came down sick, Mary also stepped in and pulled together the final talk on short notice. It was a reminder of how much this community runs on people being willing to pick up the slack for each other.

The event itself was pleasing to the eye in a way that matters more than people give it credit for. The venue was great, the signage was thoughtful and lovely, and the overall production made it easy to focus on the people and the content instead of logistics.

I will not soon forget the handful of terrifying-close-call moments with cars and tuk-tuks. If you’re headed to Mumbai for the first time, know that crossing the street is its own activity. I survived, mostly through the grace of people more experienced than me yanking me back onto the curb.

I came to WordCamp Asia as someone new to the team and I left it feeling like I’d stepped into something bigger than a job. The community showed up: curious kids, seasoned contributors, educators, plugin legends, and organizers who made the whole thing look effortless (it wasn’t). I’m already looking forward to the next one.

And in case you missed it: WordCamp India has been announced as a new flagship event. Looking forward to it!

After 13 years working on hiring workflows and Talent Acquisition at Automattic, I’ve made a career switch. Not to a new company, but a new chapter inside the same one. I spent the last several years building Automattic’s global Talent function with a lot of iteration, a lot of learning, and a team I genuinely loved working with. It wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always glamorous, and we had our moments of stress and frustration, but it was meaningful. The experience of growing that function, supported by first our CFO, and then our CPO, from nothing into something real and lasting is one of the things I’ll carry with me. I’m really proud of it. 

But over time, I realized I was craving a new challenge. And at just the right time, an opportunity came across my path.

I’ve moved over to the division that we call .Organization. It’s the group that works to connect product, community, and education, ensuring that WordPress continues to grow as a durable infrastructure for the open web. It’s essentially coming back to my roots. I co-founded the Albuquerque WordPress meetup in 2010. I co-organized the first WordCamp Albuquerque. The WordPress open source community is literally how I found Automattic in the first place.

I’m aware that not everyone works somewhere that says, “Hey! after more than a decade of building something in one area, what else might you be great at?” That’s the kind of company Automattic is, and I don’t take it for granted for even a second.

I’m stepping into this new role with a lot of humility. The WordPress community has been through a lot. Primarily I’ll be focusing on operations and events and bridging any gaps between Automattic and the community. People will see me at WordCamps and local meetups for now and around the Make Slack. Right now, the team I’m working with is finding and implementing ways for students in the education programs to get integrated into the community as contributors. This is pretty exciting as we are working on real tangible ways of building and future-proofing the community. I care about this community deeply and I want to help make things work well for the people in it and help make sure it’s around for the long haul. 

A few weeks ago, our CEO encouraged us all to get out and visit a museum in our local area. As a long-time home-office worker, I do find that I don’t really get out much! So this was a fun assignment.

I went over the the Museum of ABQ which houses exactly ONE Georgia O’Keefe, which is annoying seeing as how she spent a lot of time here and painted so much of New Mexico. I believe the one they have in the museum is the first painting she did in NM.

The building itself is a work of art, with some lovely indoor patio sculpture areas.

It also houses a lovely Henrietta Wyeth.

There’s also an exhibit on the history of the city which includes a very tiny pic of Bill Gates with Ed Roberts, the founder of the Altair 8800, the personal computer which drew Gates and Paul Allen to New Mexico in the very very early days of Microsoft.

If we are collecting odd and unusual museums, I do want to shout out to the International Rattlesnake Museum, which I will not visit because snakes freak me out, but my family has been there a million times. Pictured below is my mom and me and one of my kiddos circa 2011 just before I started working here in front of the door. Very classic New Mexico vibe.

In the spirit of letting go of stuff, I decided that I don’t need to keep all my old work notebooks. I paged through them to make sure I hadn’t stuck any important keep-worthy things in the pages (I had) and stacked them up to memorialize them in pictures.

They are very cute:

It’s a bit hard to let them go, I’m not going to lie. But I think it’s ok.

Some things I’ve learned:

• It’s ok to not always use my notebooks. It’s not a rule that I must use them. If I’m in a period during which notetaking isn’t helpful that’s fine. I pick it up again when I need it again.
• Lined notebooks are way better for me, except that if I’m in a doodling phase, lines are annoying.
• Hard cover notebooks are way better.
• A good pen that writes nicely is key! Really really key. When I don’t have a good pen, I don’t take good notes.
• My handwriting is really getting worse with time. I’m not sure if I care enough to fix that but it’s worth noticing.
• I never actually went back to previous notebooks like I thought I would.

Now I have to figure out how to dispose of them! I’m not inclined to just put them in the garbage. As it’s winter here where I live, I might use the pages as fire starters. We shall see; even though I’ve decided to let them go, they haven’t made it out of my room yet 😆 so I guess the story is, as yet, unfinished.

Twenty years. That’s just wild! WordPress (which turned 20 in 2023) came to my awareness in or around 2007. I was a stay-at-home mom, trying to figure out how to contribute to our family income, while maintaining my commitment to homeschooling them. WordPress gave me that! In a very real “this helped us pay our bills” kind of way.

WordPress, and then WordPress.com, changed everything for me. It went from being the platform that helped me contribute to my family’s income to becoming my employer. And the place where I’ve built my career.

And that’s what democratizing the web actually looks like in practice, building something that matters, the ability to earn money, and to ultimately contribute to supporting my family. All backed up by this foundational belief that everyone should have access to their own corner of the web. Gives me goosebumps.

My story isn’t unique. There are millions of creators and businesses who’ve built something real on this platform. 409 million people visiting each month. 70 million new posts. These are real people with their own stories about what WordPress.com made possible for them.

So, happy 20th birthday to WordPress.com. Thanks for trusting us with our corners of the web. Thanks for making freedom and ownership actually mean something.