Since Automattic is a distributed company and a lot of us work from home, we hold meetups to get face-to-face interaction. The whole company meets up once a year and individual teams get together more often. One component of those meetups is a “meetup project” that we all work on together.

The team I lead — “Team I/O*” — just finished a lovely week in Reykjavik, Iceland. Our team is responsible for partnerships and our APIs.

We spent the first day releasing better JavaScript support for our APIs. After that we decided to make an example app, mainly focusing on the new CORS support and implicit OAuth system.

We decided to build a media manager purely in the browser. We picked a codename and Sulfur was born.

Sulfur is an app built using Backbone, Underscore.js, Plupload, jQuery, MomentJS, Bootstrap, RequireJS, and…

As you may have noticed, we’ve just relaunched the WordPress.com Developer site (the very one you’re reading right now!) with a brand new look and feel!

We’ve rebranded the site to match the overall WordPress.com aesthetic as well as to align with the new user management and insights sections we launched just a few weeks ago.

The goal of the redesign was not only to modernize the site but make it easier for you, our partners and third-party developers to find the information you are looking for. In addition, we’ve reviewed all of our existing documentation and past blog posts to make sure the information is accurate and relevant.

Over the next few months, you’ll see more updates to the site and more frequent blog posts from our team.

I’d personally like to thank the team that worked on the relaunch with me: Raanan, Kelly, Kat, Justin

A colleague, Ian Stewart, was kind enough to share an email he sent to someone who confessed to using the same password for everything. I think it hits a number of great points and tips on passwords and security best practices, most (all?) of which are outlined in Automattic’s internal docs/handbook. Definitely a good read if you want to tighten up your online security.

tl;dr Use 1Password for everything and two-step authentication for everything.

Alright, this went long but … let’s prevent you from getting hacked!

Never ever give your password or “passphrase” (I’ll get to that) to anyone. Even if you give one to someone like me who’s helping out, change it as soon as we’re done.

No two passwords should ever be the same even if they’re “temp” or “throwaway” passwords.

To manage all your passwords use 1Password and never have to worry about remembering all your…

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