The first time I heard about the Automattic creed was on a plane flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg, sitting next to Hugh Lashbrooke, as we flew to attend the first WordCamp in Johannesburg in 2016. I’d met the Johannesburg organizing team at that year’s Cape Town WordCamp, where we were all speakers, and I decided to fly up and show my support. Hugh was there as a community deputy of the WordPress project and was (if I recall correctly) also the mentor to the Johannesburg organizing team.
During that flight, he told me all about Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, and Akismet, that sponsored him to work full time on the community team. He also told me about the Automattic Creed. When I got back from that trip, I immediately went and looked it up, and it really resonated with me. I even adopted and adapted it as the motto of the jiu-jitsu club I ran for four years.
I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.
The Automattic Creed
Having spent the previous 10+ years working with folks who saw themselves as gods due to their ability to create software, and treated “newbies” as lesser mortals to be shunned, it was refreshing to see a tech company that promoted the ideals of open source, continuous learning, helping their colleagues, and by extension, those around them, that I strove to live by every day. Every single person I’ve ever encountered or worked with, in my time contributing to the WordPress project and in the WordPress space in general, who works for Automatic has been the epitome of this creed.
Today I am excited to announce that at the beginning of May I will be joining them. I’m going to be part of the team sponsored to work on the Learn WordPress platform as a Developer Educator, creating educational content for WordPress developers.
I will miss working with the team at Delicious Brains (if they’re ever hiring I do recommend you apply). They are a great team and they have created a very supportive and collaborative work environment.
However, it has been a dream of mine since I discovered the concept of open source to work full time on an open-source project. And now, I get to live that dream.
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