What makes you happy ?

Wonderful. That’s the word that sums it all up.

I now know what everyone in the company looks like and sounds like. That’s important. It makes things more real for me. There were two defining moments for me:
- sitting around a bench next to the bay with the Golden Gate Bridge to one side and Alcatraz in the middle while we discussed and agreed various details
- the main table around which we worked sat 8. At one moment there were 8 of us, each with a laptop and each typing away working but not talking. The whole company at work. That was good…

We got heaps of work done. I know support response times dropped on my days out / back but apart from that the impact from that pov will have been small. It’s so much easier to get things done, talked about and talked around when you have the added benefit of eye contact, intonation, body language which comes with proximity. It may well be a connected world but those things cannot be replaced. And it was damn good to meet everyone I chat to daily. Faces to Text. Humour to words.

WordCamp. Apart from the relatively unplanned (and therefore not as good as I think I could have done) presentation I did, it was okay. I know I didn’t enjoy the SEO session (Bill and Ted? Think Ted – only…..worse?) but it wasn’t so bad. I know I see blogging very differently to many which explains things to me. It did mean though that I was providing support live from Wordcamp – as well as IMing my girls too :) The evening part was good too – I met another one of the guys backing Automattic (whose name I’ve not seen anywhere so it’s not appearing here either) and had more of a chat to a few people. There was a meetup of sorts the night before with people who had come over early and I met Scott of Laughing Squid – the best logo ever. (And still the company on http://wordpress.org/hosting with – afaik – no complaints at all. That’s in over 2.5 years). So Wordcamp was good.

San Francisco. I kept marvelling about the roads. It’s not that they had them (so do we!) but that they were so straight and so damn long. And in some cases, very very steep. I’ve a pile of photos that I should move to a directory – they are online as I uploaded them so J and the girls could see what I’d been up to – but I need to see what dross is there too.

Product. We all worked well together anyway but the product of this last week means that we work better now and that means that wordpress.com users will see that benefit in many ways. And wasn’t that the point?

There’s probably something I wanted to blog but I’ve forgotten. I’m still extremely tired despite 14 hours sleep last night (which happened unexpectedly as I sat on the bed and keeled over) but which a day’s solid work has contributed to.

It was good fun it was :)