Tiles

Recently I was helping out my daughter with her art class. Will summarize some quick thoughts here.

Au7omattic

Today, I turn 7 years at Automattic.

Overall, 2023 was a great year:

• Working at Automattic allowed me to travel with my family and work from different locations. We traveled to all neighboring countries (Greece, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Albania, Serbia), and also France, Turkey, and Spain.
• Managed to ship tons of projects; a big one was where we structured and held a Security Workshop for over 40 teams (~250 engineers).
• Got deeper into philosophy and psychology, and kept blogging/sharing my learnings. This helped me improve my role as a DevEx engineer.
• Earned my WordCamp Speaker badge at WordCamp Skopje.

Time keeps flying at Automattic, it really puzzles me to think that it’s been 7 years already. Here’s to many more years 🙂

P.S. Check out my High Five post, 5 years at Automattic.

P.P.S. Happy birthday, Matt!

Lunyu (Conversations)

I recently read this book. This is a book by Confucius’ students – he himself never did any writings. There are many translations of the books, and while none of them are perfect, I found these quotes to be my favorite ones.

Power of Habit overview

I’ve bought this book some time ago and only recently spent time reading it. Overall it is a good book – reading it made me think of my habits and also the habits of my close ones.

Philosophy of Software Design overview (and rants)

Recently I spent some time reading this book that a coworker suggested. My overall feeling is that it’s a good book. The first 40% of pages can be triggering (makes some strong statements), but then some of those are rejected later, as expected in a philosophy book 🙂

My take is that I think this book should be literally read in a group. The best outcome of it was just discussing it with my coworkers or ranting about it (find <rant> in this post).