Karen Alma
What I think about. Things that happen to me. Stuff I like. And other things.
Category: Work
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Someone likes to sneak into my office space. I think he thinks I can’t see him. 🐈
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Working from the road while traveling is not for the faint of heart. It can be very stressful finding reliable internet and comfortable work spaces. I really hit the jackpot today though. Yesterday, my husband and I scoured the town we’re in for a decent looking coffee shop. We saw a few that were embedded…
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Thanks to Atlas Obscura I discovered the existence of this amazing tree right next to St Pancras Old Church. The gravestones were piled up around the tree by Thomas Hardy himself, back when the St Pancras train lines were being developed. The story is that he was an underling at the company in charge of…
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A distributed workforce is the most effective way to build a company [] talent and intelligence are equally distributed around the world but opportunity is not. – Matt Mullenweg Founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com WooCommerce, and Jetpack. At Automattic, we have over 800 employees living in over 67 countries. Some of…
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I’ve been working from the road for about 5 weeks, and it can be a big challenge to find good spots, both for comfort and for internet access. Given that internet is a must for my work, comfort sometimes goes out the window. Normally I can work from my RV and I prefer that since…
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A few weeks back, I took a day off to go camping with my family. I am pretty used to working on the road while traveling in my RV with my family, but it was my intention to be completely offline for this particular outing. I had one message to send to someone before I…
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I’m in Singapore for a work trip and am really enjoying the food. The breakfast buffet at the hotel is fantastic with a stellar spread of amazing fruit every morning. The dragon fruit is underwhelming, to be frank, I expected it to be sweet and delicious but it’s bland and sort of boring. The waiter…
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The last time I had a milestone at Automattic, I was too busy on my sabbatical to write about the anniversary, but it’s been a year, and here I am. Six years on February 6th! Wow. And what a year. I got a new awesome laptop. This usually happens at around four years but I didn’t…
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Ever since I started at Automattic, the Dvorak keyboard layout has been lurking in the background. Matt Mullenweg wrote a great post about Dvorak so I won’t go into the history. You can also read this zine for a quick explanation. Basically, it’s a keyboard layout that puts the keys into different positions so it’s easier to type. Allegedly. I’ll give…
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Since I started working with the hiring team at Automattic we’ve had a consistent focus on hiring Happiness Engineers all over the world. At times, we’ve even focused our recruiting efforts in specific areas like Spain, Argentina, and Brazil. Over the last few years, we’ve noticed that without intentional efforts, we just don’t get as many…
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When I talk to people about Automattic, remote work is often a topic of conversation. And along with that usually comes some version of my personal story: my kids are homeschooled, I work from home 100% of my time, we spend an insane number of months traveling in a motorhome, etc, etc. How *do* you…