Author: KokkieH

Wally goes to Kampala

Last week I got to visit Uganda for the first time.

WordPress (in case you didn’t know) is open source software made by a community of thousands of people from across the world. And the members of this community like to come together from time to time at events called WordCamps to connect, network, and learn from one another.

Last week, the Uganda WordPress community hosted the Uganda Website Projects Competition 2024 , a so-called NextGen WordCamp–that is a WordCamp with a twist, not just bringing together people around WordPress, but around a specific topic or use of WordPress–in the capital city, Kampala. This competition is all about equipping young people to use WordPress to solve problems in their communities.

As one of the biggest contributors to the WordPress software, and members of the WordPress community ourselves, Automattic regularly sponsors WordCamps, and this competition was no different. But not only do we sponsor the events. We also try to actually attend, so we can connect with members of the community, learn from them, hear what they need, and chat about our products for WordPress.

I volunteered to help staff this event, and at the last moment the organisers asked if I might be willing to give a talk to the students and other attendees on the day.

Not one to back down from a challenge I said yes. What followed was a hectic week trying to put together a half-hour talk, for a bunch of students ranging from primary school to college-age, from an entirely different cultural background than me, that would hopefully inspire them in some way. I was almost done with the talk when I decided it can be improved by including a puppet (anything is better with a puppet…just compare A Christmas Carol to A Muppet Christmas Carol, for example…and my job title is Puppetmattician, after all).

So Wally went with me to Uganda.

Here’s a live-stream recording of the talk, if you’d like to watch it. I had to trim it a bit for time due to a change in the event schedule, so I’ll post the full version underneath, for posterity and all that.

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Hurry up and wait

As I start writing this post it has just turned a quarter to ten. I’m sitting in a departure area at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg, waiting for my flight to Amsterdam where my team will be meeting next week.

My flight was supposed to start boarding in a few minutes, except, there’s no plane to board. The incoming flight from Amsterdam hasn’t arrived yet, so my eleven-fifteen flight is now scheduled to depart at half past one tomorrow morning.

It’s a blessing in a way–arriving a couple hours later means less time I’ll have to kill before I can check into my hotel tomorrow. If only the chairs in airport departure areas were made with some consideration for human comfort.

But alas, the torture that is air travel will be extended this time around. I have no choice but to wait…

What’s in a name?

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.

I never realised this during my several years of teaching Romeo and Juliet to high-schoolers, but this is just the type of thing an infatuated teenage girl would say.

Because names do matter. In fantasy fiction knowing someone’s true name gives you power over them. In the Bible names were often a prophesy about someone’s life purpose, sometimes decreed even before their birth, and divine calling on someone’s life was marked by a changing of their name. In many cultures today still, mispronouncing or shortening someone’s name (because it’s hard to pronounce) is a terrible insult, because their name means something and if you change the name, it no longer means the same thing.

In most Western cultures we’ve forgotten this. We think, like Juliet, that a name is just a label that we can use as long as we need it, and discard when we’re done with it.

A friend of mine is stepping out in faith and starting something new, and I’m part of a group of people she’s brought together to give her support, feedback, and some accountability. She also asked us for help coming up with a name for her new venture.

There were a few suggestions, and none of them were bad, but they were all so…everyday. They were generic. There are likely a few score other people using the exact same names, each one intending it to mean something slightly different.

So I didn’t suggest a name. I asked a question. What is your goal? What makes you stand out? What name fits what you plan to do, and that wouldn’t make as much sense if anyone else used it? In other words, what is your brand, that will make people think of you first and foremost, and no one else?

An oft-repeated joke among software engineers, attributed to Phil Karlton, is that there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. Coming up with clear, descriptive, but unique names for stuff while coding is surprisingly hard. It’s something I think of so continuously, it spills over into other areas of my life these days I guess.

I think Shakespeare understood the importance of names. That’s why those famous words were uttered by a foolish teenage girl, and not by a great emperor, king or general. What’s in a name? The very essence of what something is, so choose carefully!

Hope

I hope the first day of 2024 treated you well. Mine was productive…I was awake at 5, so I got up and went for a run before spending the rest of the morning in the garden, mowing, weeding, and landscaping. It feels good to be at the end of the first day of a new year and be able to point at what I’ve already achieved.

Many are less fortunate than me. From people who lost their homes and loved ones in floods in my home province last night, to the devastating earthquake in Japan just a few hours ago, 2024 is already shaping up to be a rotten year for some.

And yet…

As I reflected on the past year and looked ahead to the new one during the past couple of weeks, a word kept surfacing in my thoughts:

Hope

The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘hope’ as, ‘a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen,’ and, ‘a feeling of trust.’ It’s about feelings and desires. Basically, a wish. But that’s not the word that had anchored itself in my mind. The word I gradually become obsessed with is infinitely bigger than my wants.

Pondering this while pulling out weeds this morning I was reminded of the well-known passage in Jeremiah 29:11: ‘“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.‘

This is a passage that is often quoted out of context, so it’s important to fill in the blanks here. Jeremiah speaks this prophecy to the Israelites who’d been carried away in captivity by the Babylonians. They’ve lost everything, they’re in a strange country, and they feel their God has abandoned them. Looking at the state of the world at the moment, I can begin to imagine what they’re feeling.

God tells them to have hope, he will keep his promises, he will answer when they call. In the Bible, hope is the confident expectation of what God has promised. It’s not based in our feelings, but in God’s faithfulness.

Over the weekend, scrolling through my Facebook feed, I spotted part of the headline to an opinion piece on a news site I follow, Hope is a verb… Given my recent obsession with the word I took note of it, and thought it an interesting idea, but I didn’t click through to read it. Earlier today I went looking for it.

The article is very focused on the South African political landscape, but one part stood out:

“…hope is not a passive or evasive state but an active one. Hope is a state of doing. People draw hope from seeing others do things and make sacrifices for other people, and who therefore must still have hope themselves.”
Mark Heywood

In Jeremiah 29 the Israelites are anxious to go home, having been promised this by “prophets” among them. Through Jeremiah, God tells them to get comfortable in their new home, as they’re going to be there a while. But not as victims and outcasts, cynical and bitter about their lot. No, he tells them to show up and participate, to be good citizens and to pray for their new country as if it’s their own. And only then comes the promise in verse 11 and onward.

Hope is a verb. It’s not wishing. It’s doing. It’s showing up. It’s living in expectation of the change you want to see, and being part of that change. It doesn’t deny that bad stuff happens (that’s the wishing kind of hope), but it chooses to take action and do what you’re able to do to make things better, no matter how small.

That’s the word that’s been slowly invading my thoughts, that’s gradually changing my perspective, that’s making me want to do more, to have a bigger impact this year. To be a blessing because I’ve been blessed with much.

Instead of resolutions this year, I’m doing hope.

So I wish you a hope-filled 2024.

New beginnings…

And so we’re at the end of yet another year!

2023 was a year of changes and new beginnings (in many cases returning to passions I’d long given up on, so re-beginnings?)

The biggest of these was starting a new career.

No, I haven’t left Automattic…

If we can quickly rewind, I joined the company behind WordPress.com (and Tumblr, and Woo, and Simplenote, and Pocket Casts, and Day One, and these days the list is getting really long) eight years and a month ago as a Happiness Engineer, initially providing live chat support before finding my way back to the public support forums where I’d started out as a volunteer over a decade ago ( 😱! ) as part of the public support team.

I really enjoyed helping people make the most of their sites on WordPress.com, but over the years the requirements of the job changed, and so did I. That’s normal. People change, their needs, interests and priorities change. That’s just life.

But in my case that change left me feeling deeply unhappy and unfulfilled. That’s also normal. Countless people go through this each year. Typically you have two options: tough it out, or leave. Companies that value their support staff the way Automattic does, with all the explicit and implicit benefits of working here, are few and far between, so leaving wasn’t really an option for me, so as a breadwinner I had no choice but to tough it out.

Except, Automattic is an amazing place to work, and one of the more unusual opportunities we have here is to make a lateral move to a different team, or even a completely different role. For a role switch this usually means applying for a position and going through a trial similar to a new hire, and like with any job you must make sure you’re qualified to do the job in question beforehand. Sometimes this requires further study or training, and many people here study part-time, and some even leave and reapply for a different position once they’re ready.

But I was fortunate to make it into an apprenticeship program where, for the past year-and-a-half, I received on-the-job training for the new role I wanted to move to. And so, a month ago (and exactly eight years after joining Automattic), I officially made the switch to the role of Code Wrangler (what we call software engineers) as part of the team that builds and maintains the Woo.com marketplace.

So it was a year of challenge – I had to learn a lot, about code and the practice of coding, but also about communicating and collaborating in new ways. I became comfortable with imposter syndrome and embraced the power of “yet”. And at 42 years old I embarked on a new career (my fourth if you don’t count my aborted attempt at being a post-graduate student…hopefully this one sticks).

That’s not the only change of 2023:

I joined the leadership of my church (in a way even more terrifying that starting that new career…my last stint in church leadership and ministry left me wounded and cynical and it’s only through grace that it didn’t cost me my faith), and preached again, did a live puppet show, and played in a worship team, all for the first time in over a decade.

I bought a piano and started playing again.

I got on a plane for the first time since the pandemic, and visited a new country (Vienna, Austria).

I saw my first ballet (we took the minion to see The Nutcracker the week before Christmas).

I started learning to sail.

I got a new dentist.

Yeah, I’m sure you have questions, especially about that last one 😉. Suffice it to say 2023 was a good year, full of challenging, but positive changes (perhaps all change is positive, and it all comes down to how you choose to view it?)

As I’m writing this it’s softly raining outside, and I count myself blessed and looking forward to what 2024 will bring.