Elijah Potter, a software engineer who founded and maintains Harper, explores quality of life as a critical decision-making factor. You can read the original post on his blog.

With a rel­a­tively small team, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), Jason Fried, and 37signals laid the foun­da­tion for a num­ber of suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies and main­tained a working com­mu­nity of ex­tremely in­tel­li­gent en­gi­neers. I have long fol­lowed their work and benefitted from their advice, which I apply to my own practice.

I re­cently read Getting Real, 37signals’s guidebook for build­ing a suc­cess­ful SaaS com­pany. Through­out their writ­ten work, Fried and DHH bake the same deeply personal idea into their advice: As you build your busi­ness or ap­pli­ca­tion, set­ your­self up to have a good qual­ity of life.

Frequently, making decisions in the interest of your own quality of life can also produce better software. If you come to a fork in the road where a de­ci­sion must be made be­tween two or more op­tions, you can of­ten safely choose the one that improves your own qual­ity of life.

In an older blog post, I pro­posed a different kind of men­tal short­cut, one I found effective after imagining what “the most effective engineer” would do in my position. When you imag­ine your­self on the path to be­ing the kind of per­son you most ad­mire, I found, you tend to be­come that per­son, as if by ac­ci­dent.

Effectiveness and well-being aren’t at odds. Imagining yourself as “the most effective engineer” shouldn’t prevent you from making decisions that improve the quality of your life. Rather, these two shortcuts can be used in tandem.

Eat Your Own Dog Food

When you are re­quired to use your own prod­uct—to eat your own dog food, as the saying goes—there’s a strong personal in­cen­tive to make your own product better. If you make a change and it im­proves the qual­ity of your own life, it will almost certainly improve the lives of your users, too.

Here’s an example: Dogfooding, as we know, is a helpful way to identify bugs. If you use your own soft­ware, you re­ceive a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of what the ex­pe­ri­ence is like for the av­er­age user who con­sumes your prod­uct. When you encounter an obvious bug, you can take steps to address it so your future users won’t.

Which Feature Is Best?

When work­ing on a new fea­ture or ca­pa­bil­ity, it is al­most al­ways bet­ter to pri­or­i­tize that which will most tan­gi­bly help you.

For me, this meant mak­ing Harper avail­able in Discord. At the time, I was us­ing Harper a ton in GitHub. I had grown used to typ­ing out a messy mes­sage before hit­ting Ctrl+E to fix all my mis­takes, a strategy that helped me to write code re­views faster. But I felt frus­trated when­ever I needed to col­lab­o­rate with a fel­low main­tainer in Discord because I had to type slower and manually fix my mis­takes. By adding Harper to Discord, I improved my own qual­ity of life and in­tro­duced a core ca­pa­bil­ity to my prod­uct, opening a new mar­ket for po­ten­tial users.

Indirectly Helping Your Users

Sometimes improving your own quality of life is the right call even when it doesn’t directly improve the product experience for your users.

Consider con­tin­u­ous in­te­gra­tion. It may take a few min­utes to com­plete, or it may take a few hours. In ei­ther case, the wait can be frustrating because it slows everything down.

Now imagine that you must choose between adding a new, highly-re­quested fea­ture to your prod­uct and speed­ing up your con­tin­uous in­te­gra­tion. How should you choose to spend your time?

If you believe that speed­ing up your con­tin­u­ous in­te­gra­tion won’t im­prove your qual­ity of life, then I sug­gest that you add the new fea­ture in­stead. However, in my experience, this is rarely the case. Engineers can lose nontrivial amounts of time waiting for their GitHub Actions work­flow to com­plete so they can free up time and space to work on other things. If you have had that ex­pe­ri­ence, then speed­ing up your con­tin­u­ous in­te­gra­tion (or even re­mov­ing it!) might be the bet­ter choice. You’ll move faster, get more done, and, I bet, feel better about the work.

Always Use Your Brain

No mat­ter how many blan­ket rules you encounter, please use your brain. Some­times a men­tal short­cut is the right move, and other times you need to put some real gray mat­ter to work. Each de­ci­sion should be afforded the consideration it de­serves—and learning to assess each situation accurately is an extremely valuable skill.

• We preserved and collected.  A litigation hold was issued to our employees, including Matt. We collected over six terabytes of documents. More than 1.5 million documents were reviewed. Five of Matt’s personal devices were forensically imaged, including his Telegram, WhatsApp, and Signal messaging applications.
• Nothing relevant was part of any ephemeral messaging. Our e-discovery vendor collected messages from Matt’s messaging platforms going back to 2012 (Telegram), 2015 (WhatsApp) and 2019 (Signal) through March 2026 — the entire key period in the case and years on either side. WP Engine cannot identify a single missing message about anything having to do with this case. 
• They had every chance to find evidence of their accusations. Fact discovery produced more than 225,000 documents and over 114 hours of deposition testimony — including 21 hours of Matt across three days, with three attorneys, more than 80 exhibits, and over 1,300 questions.

In 2015, following months of pro-democracy protests, Tom Grundy founded Hong Kong Free Press, which bills itself as the city’s “only independent English-language news source.” Since then, Hong Kong has slipped further down the World Press Freedom Index. Free Press journalists navigate “one of the most complicated press-freedom situations in the world,” says Grundy, the site’s editor-in-chief. “The last thing I have the capacity for and am able to worry about is the technology side.”

A few years later, as worrying new security laws took effect, Grundy turned to Automattic’s Newspack for help. The seven journalists at Free Press provide steady, on-the-ground coverage, but they’re not website developers. A bespoke content management system required constant maintenance, and conversations with developers faltered. He worried about site stability and donor engagement, but felt “underprepared and unqualified” for technical conversations. “I needed to speak to tech people who were also aware and understanding of journalistic terminology, and where we come from,” he says.

That year, Grundy began working with Newspack to migrate multiple donation management tools and the Free Press’s content management system to a single platform. “Newspack very patiently worked with me for over a year to get it right,” he says. Through Newspack’s Audience Management tools, the Free Press has developed a greater variety of member benefits, from feature previews and exclusive columns to ad-free browsing, and increased donations by 33 percent.

The security of Free Press’s reporting is a top concern for Grundy, who has seen other newsrooms raided and prominent publications closed. Newspack—which is built on WordPress and hosted by WP Cloud, both Automattic products—has helped “keep the website safe if the worst happens in Hong Kong,” he says. “We have had no downtime.” Last year, when the Free Press was selected for a potentially costly tax inspection, Grundy reached out to Newspack for help putting a targeted fundraising plan in motion. “Within a month, they’d rolled it out to everybody,” he says. 

Facing an unstable media landscape, Grundy credits Newspack with keeping Hong Kong Free Press nimble. “I can speak to someone directly who speaks my language, in terms of journalism, and gets things sorted,” he says. “That has liberated me and our news outlet to focus on navigating the red lines and getting the news out.”

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Zach Spears, a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, used our recent Radical Speed Month initiative to finish and ship a project years in the making: Brickomattic, a collection of LEGO® kits that create hangable versions of logos from all of Automattic’s products. Below is Zach’s story of how the project came to be.

This month marks my five-year anniversary at Automattic. As I look ahead to my sabattical with excitement, I can’t help but also look back on my tenure and the incredible things I have been a part of. In a similar fashion, Automattic the organization seems to find itself at a crossroads. We celebrated our 20th anniversary last year, and what it means to be Automattic is changing. We can see these exciting changes with recent acquisitions like Beeper, and changes to how we grow our existing businesses like Automattic for Agencies. As with any remarkable milestone, this is all worth noting and celebrating.

From a young age, I’ve always enjoyed the art of gift-giving; I find that it gives me a way to express my appreciation when words may not come so easily. Over the last five years, I’ve had the opportunity to be part of five different teams at Automattic that touch nearly every part of the business, and to work with incredible colleagues from across the world. Before long, my gratitude for my coworkers combined with my lifelong love of creativity and LEGO® bricks, and I decided to put together some microbuilds.

For my team meetup one year, I used BrickLink’s Studio software to design and organize mini LEGO® rocket kits for my team, which was known as Jupiter. The next year, on a team where we referred to ourselves as pirates. I constructed a small movable pirate ship, complete with custom packaging and instructions. A year later, for a team called Retrograde, I created a small diorama that featured a spaceship against a celestial backdrop.

In addition to the team-specific sets, I wanted to build something more generic for the whole of the company. To do so, I challenged myself to recreate Automattic’s logo in brick form, which I’d never done before. I was really happy with my first design which was intended to sit flat on a desk, and I later adapted it with parts from LEGO® art sets to become suitable for wall hanging. After I shared the design internally, Matt Mullenweg asked if I could build some for the Automattic offices. If you ever find yourself at our offices in San Francisco or New York City, keep an eye out for the logo built from LEGO® pieces!

Once I sent out the finished designs to our offices, I began crafting a series of wall hanging designs for Automattic’s primary products and business units, a process that took several months of slow (but invigorating) iteration and design. Some of the designs came together seamlessly like Day One, and some proved more complicated such as Sensei LMS. The most difficult to figure out was the Woo logo, which is a division I currently work in. I first tried a more minimalist cart design, but eventually came up with a technique to capture the bendy Woo “W.”

Nearly all of the final 20 designs are the same height and width and centered around the LEGO® wall hook-compatible part. This means that they can be displayed as wall art just like the official LEGO® Art sets. I’m proud of how the designs came together, and my personal favorite is the Sensei LMS design, which features the silhouette of a Bonsai tree.

Launching Brickomattic

As the 20 final designs were finally coming together, I needed a way to share to share them with my colleagues that felt more like an art gallery than a blog post. I also wanted the kits to feel three-dimensional the way a physical set would, and to experience the joy of the kit coming together, as it would in a LEGO® video game.

And so: Brickomattic.

I launched a WordPress.com site, grabbed the domain brickomattic.com, and began building. With assistance from generative coding tools, I was able to implement a fully featured and inviting gallery complete with self-constructing 3D models and an x-ray button. I also designed and exported building instructions and high-resolution renders of the designs. The site uses a library of parts from LDraw and LDR export files from the Studio software to build the immersive gallery. I’m currently working on adapting this plugin into an open-source WooCommerce plugin for MOC (“My Own Creation,” a term for custom-designed models) sellers in the broader AFOL (Adult Fans of LEGO®) community.

Why LEGO®?

At Automattic we like to say that code is poetry. This looks great on a T-shirt, but it’s also an expression of a broader philosophy. We approach what we create as a business with thought and intention. From that standpoint, it’s not much of a stretch to draw a line to the LEGO® artform; both take small parts and combine them to create something worth being proud of.

It’s also fair to point out that I’m a lifelong LEGO® fan, and this was something that I did for myself. I love creating, and I love sharing the things that I create with others. Brickomattic is as much an act of play as it is a gift to my coworkers. It forced me to step outside of my comfort zone and build things I didn’t think I was capable of.

Finally, I have a strong belief in the value of the tangible. As a business that builds software, and that works distributed, we can sometimes feel disconnected from our work. This is why meetups and team swag are important to our culture: They foster a feeling of belonging. Creating a physical representation of the software you work on every day is an important physical reminder of the things you build and the impact that they (and you) can have.

Verònica Fuerte is the founder and “creative directress” of Barcelona’s Hey Studio, where her team builds visual languages for clients and projects around the world. When she looks at the design industry, she sees something that’s always been true but too often overlooked: Women have been shaping it all along, they just haven’t always gotten the credit.

That observation became the seed for Women at Work, a podcast dedicated to amplifying the voices of female creatives across design, creativity, and innovation. The premise is simple but powerful. “If you listen to somebody that made it happen,” Verònica says, “you can have the same experience. You can follow the same path. It’s just about having examples of other people.”

The podcast’s next step was, as Verònica puts it, organic. Hey Studio’s website has always run on WordPress, so when Women at Work grew enough to need its own digital home, the choice of destination was clear. And while she has long appreciated the ease of open source software, WordPress’s longevity made her decision even simpler. “I know that WordPress is going to be forever,” she says. “So I think it makes my life easier in many, many aspects.”

The site brings everything Women at Work is about—episodes, guest stories, and its broader mission—into one place, and gives the project a professional presence that matches the quality of the conversations themselves. 

But Verònica is thinking bigger than episodes and archives. “A podcast is a community,” she says. “And I think how this community can be seen is part of the future.” With WordPress.com as the foundation, Women at Work is building toward exactly that: a growing platform that helps the next generation of creatives see themselves in the industry—and in each other.

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Over the past two decades, open source software has powered much of the internet’s infrastructure. Technologies like WordPress—which powers more than 40% of the web—demonstrate the impact of a model built on global collaboration and shared knowledge.

Now, though, the open web is facing an inflection point. As a handful of digital landlords and closed AI systems threaten to replace a free and open internet with algorithmic walled gardens, those of us fighting for an open-source future need to stick together.

To tell this story, Automattic partnered with acclaimed director Bao Nguyen on a new documentary short, Code for the People. The film explores this critical breaking point and serves as a rallying cry to reclaim the open-source spirit before the future of the internet is decided for good.

At a time when AI and digital platforms are redefining the rules of the internet, Code for the People invites audiences to engage in a conversation that extends beyond software. The documentary argues that the future of the web will depend on the choices the technology community makes today, positioning open source as a strategic foundation for building a more resilient, transparent, and decentralized digital infrastructure.

Earlier this month, Code for The People partnered with Variety and KQED to hold premiere screening events in New York City and San Francisco. The panels and discussions that followed made one thing obvious: These aren’t niche concerns. They’re questions that matter to anyone who builds, creates, or publishes online. Check out the full documentary above, and experience the premiere screenings through the gallery below.

On June 23, around 40 students from Illinois and Louisiana will wrap up the year at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) as the first graduating cohort of AI Leaders—the nation’s first workforce-focused AI literacy course tied to a recognized credential.

These students built real WordPress projects. They applied generative AI to real work. For example, Stephen Poole completed the Ultimate Success track and posted a reflection after every session, and shipped his portfolio at stefanpoole.dev. Another student, Sharaheel Ali, finished WordPress 1–8 and launched sharali.blog, framing his portfolio around WordPress support engineering, cybersecurity, and AI. They earned a micro-credential backed by UIC and the WordPress Foundation. And those who completed the course also earned $1,000. Automattic is proud that we joined the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) to make a donation to UIC Tech Solutions Open Source Fund earlier this year.

Built on Open Source

AI Leaders works because it’s built on open source. Students learn on WordPress, which powers more than 40% of the web, and contribute back to it. They use generative AI as a tool and leave with a credential employers can verify. The community they build while contributing to WordPress remains long after graduation. 

At Automattic, we believe deeply in open source; it’s the ethos that built the web. We think it should help build the next generation of AI-literate workers too—in the open, accessible to all, and with full ownership of the work they do.

Bigger Things are on the Horizon

AI Leaders is just one piece of Automattic’s broader investment in education. We’ve pledged $500 million worth of hosting accounts over the next five years to support open source learning, workforce development, and the next generation of contributors to the web.

We’re investing in this because access to AI and open source skills shouldn’t depend on where you live or what you can afford. The first cohort proves the model works. Now we want to help it grow

What’s Next

Prospective employers and agencies will attend a graduation party in Chicago to meet the students, and more job placements are in motion. The next round of AI Leaders is on the horizon; we’ll share application details for that soon. And to the inaugural AI Leaders cohort: congratulations. The web is what we make it, and we’re excited to watch you shape that legacy.

Automattic was built on the belief that publishing should be open and accessible to everyone. That mission only means something if the spaces where people create, connect, and share are also safe—especially for kids. Today, we’re proud to announce that Automattic has joined the Tech Coalition, a global alliance of technology companies working together to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA).

The Tech Coalition brings together more than 60 companies (including Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Snap) to develop safer products, share threat intelligence, and support research that no single company could drive on its own. Members collaborate on detection technology, cross-platform signal sharing through programs like Lantern, and transparency standards that raise the bar across the industry.

Child safety is something we’ve thought deeply about and care deeply about across our platforms, from Tumblr to WordPress.com. But protecting kids online isn’t something any one company can solve alone. Joining the Tech Coalition helps us expand beyond what we can accomplish within our own walls, and allows us to contribute to something larger alongside people who share that commitment.

An open web requires its stewards to lead on safety. That starts with us.

We’re proud to share that Pressable and WordPress VIP have each earned official certification from the Secure Hosting Alliance (SHA), an i2Coalition initiative that recognizes hosting providers with a genuine, demonstrable commitment to security, reliability, and responsible operations. At the same time, through WP Cloud’s sponsorship of the SHA, several WP Cloud partners have earned certification of their own.

What the SHA Evaluates

Certification from the  SHA Trust Seal Program requires providers to demonstrate operational standards across four areas: 

• Transparent customer-facing policies
• Documented infrastructure misuse protocols with prioritized abuse response
• Proactive network reliability and recovery planning
• Lawful handling of government and law enforcement data requests

These principles represent the day-to-day discipline that separates hosting built for trust from hosting built for price.

Pressable: Built for Agencies, Certified for Trust

For the agencies and high-growth businesses building on Pressable, this certification provides independent, third-party verification of what our customers already expect: fast abuse response, transparent communication, and infrastructure engineered for real-world traffic demands.

“Most hosting providers compete primarily on what they charge. SHA is about what they’re willing to be accountable for,” Vik Patel, general manager of Pressable explains,  “For the agencies and businesses building on Pressable, this certification means their infrastructure has been independently reviewed and held to a documented standard. That’s the kind of assurance serious operators actually want.”

WordPress VIP: Enterprise-Grade Security, Formally Recognized

WordPress VIP serves some of the world’s largest publishers, brands, and governments. At that scale, security, abuse response, and lawful data handling are baseline requirements. SHA certification reflects the operational rigor that VIP’s enterprise customers already demand.

“Running infrastructure for enterprise clients like NASA means treating security, abuse response, and lawful data handling as core obligations every day,” says Steph Yiu, CEO, WordPress VIP. “SHA’s standards align with what our enterprise customers already require of us, and earning the accreditation reflects the operational work behind that — work that usually doesn’t get recognized publicly.”

WP Cloud: Extending High Standards Across the Ecosystem

SHA accreditation has historically been most accessible to the largest, best-resourced hosting providers. Through WP Cloud, Automattic is changing that. As an official SHA sponsor, WP Cloud is covering the cost of accreditation for its partner ecosystem, putting the same trust seal within reach of independent hosts, agencies, and specialty providers who are already doing the work.

“The Secure Hosting Alliance is one of the most credible efforts I’ve seen to name and elevate the hosts who are doing this the right way,” says Jesse Friedman, Head of WP Cloud, Automattic “We didn’t want SHA accreditation to be something only the largest providers could afford.” 

Several WP Cloud partners have already earned certification: Convesio, a containerized WordPress host with a WooCommerce focus; Ivapix, built for agencies and multi-site operators; and Infinite Source, which combines development and hosting under one roof.

A Healthier Web Starts With Accountable Infrastructure

Hosting providers don’t just sell servers; we provide the foundation that businesses, journalists, nonprofits, and creators rely on to reach the world. The Secure Hosting Alliance represents the industry choosing to hold itself to a higher standard, and we’re glad to have Pressable, WordPress VIP, and a growing cohort of WP Cloud partners standing on the right side of that line.

To learn more about the SHA Trust Seal Program, visit hostingsecurity.net. WP Cloud partners interested in starting their SHA accreditation can get in touch.

Sharing Where We Stay

Automattic is fully distributed, with no headquarters. A few times a year, teams meet in person at places like a villa in Tuscany, a beach house on the Outer Banks, or a cabin outside Boulder.

Over time, we’ve built a valuable list of team-tested retreat spots: places that work for fifteen people with laptops, jet lag, and strong coffee opinions.

That list mostly lived in spreadsheets and our internal P2 system. I kept thinking it deserved a better home. So on the side, in evenings and weekends, I built one: meetomattic.com.

What it is

Meetomattic is a public directory of the venues Automattic teams have actually stayed in. Not aspirational listings, places we’ve booked, slept in, worked from, and would (or wouldn’t) book again. You can browse by city, see the venues, and read the kind of practical notes that only matter once you’ve tried to run a demo over patchy hotel Wi-Fi.

It’s small on purpose. No accounts, no booking engine, no affiliate links. Just a clean window into how one distributed company actually gathers in the physical world.

Why bother

This is a side project I’m tinkering with for fun. It isn’t going to move a metric. It probably won’t show up in a quarterly review. But distributed work is becoming more common, and the companies figuring it out are mostly figuring it out alone. Every team I talk to asks the same questions when they start planning their first meetup: Where do you go? What do you look for? What’s worth paying for (and what isn’t)?

We’ve been answering those questions internally for nearly two decades. It felt strange to keep the answers to ourselves.

What I hope happens

If a founder at a 15-person remote startup books a place from this list and their team comes home closer than they were before, that’s the win. If another distributed company publishes their own version and we can borrow ideas from each other, even better. The ambition is modest: Share what we’ve learned, lower the activation energy for in-person time at remote companies, and generate a little goodwill in a community that’s done a lot for us.

It’s a work in progress. Venues are still being added, photos are still being chased down, and I keep finding small things to polish. But it’s live, it’s real, and it’s ours to share.

Take a look: meetomattic.com. If you run a distributed team and end up booking somewhere from the list, I’d love to hear how it went.