Something pretty amazing happened yesterday. All the women of Automattic had dinner together to talk about something incredibly important to us: getting more qualified women to apply at our company.

We are lucky. Automattic makes sure that an open position goes to the right person, regardless of gender. A lot of companies work hard at this, and many are getting it right (at least most of the time).

We have noticed, however, that in our case, fewer women apply in the first place. Anyone in a technology or traditionally male-dominated field obviously knows this already. One of the things we discussed was how each of us ended up applying to Automattic – interestingly, many of us believed – no, assumed –  we wouldn’t be qualified enough, and ultimately needed a nudge.

We, as women, can read a job description and see one item that we may be weak on or…

On the first of May, I started a new job at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. I was hired as a “Code Wrangler,” but to date I have not written a lick of code. This is because for the first three weeks new employees must participate in a customer support rotation. I know what you are thinking: “Let the software engineers communicate directly with customers? I saw Office Space, so I know that’s a bad idea!” or maybe “Bummer, customer service is a thankless soul-sucking quagmire of loathsomeness.” Surprisingly, neither one of these normally valid assumptions is true in this case. So what makes working at Automattic so special that software engineers can enjoy communicating directly with users and customer service ends up being rewarding and fun? Quite a few things actually.

The customer service team is known as the “Happiness Team,” and its members are “Happiness Engineers.” When I…

We’ve recently made some updates to the REST API which is available here on WordPress.com and for any Jetpack-enabled site that has the REST API module activated. The API now has full read and write support for custom post types and post metadata.

You can specify a post’s post type when you create or edit it. If you’re fetching a single post, you will receive its post type in the response. Of course, you can also specify a post type when fetching a series of posts. In all cases the parameter to use or look out for is type.

You can also query posts by metadata using the new meta_key and meta_value parameters. You can add, update, delete or retrieve a post’s metadata when creating, editing or getting a single post, using the new metadata parameter which accepts an array of metadata keys, ids, previous_value

We think it’s important that you own the content you create online, which is why we make it simple to import or export all your data — you wrote it it, it’s yours, and you can take it where you’d like. If you want to become a part of the WordPress.com community but have been posting on Tumblr, Blogger, LiveJournal, Posterous, or other services, you can move your whole oeuvre over with a few clicks. (It’s just as easy to leave, but we’d miss you!)

This also means that if you’re blogging with a service that’s phasing out, as Posterous is doing on April 30, it’s easy to keep your site going by setting up a WordPress.com account and importing all your content. (Check out the Posterous blog announcement for more details on the change.)

We know it can be rough leaving a tool that you know and…