The Office of the (My) Future

I start a new job on Monday and I want to brag about my new office.

First of all, there’s the commute: I get to walk to work with a cup of coffee.

It has a fully-stocked kitchen that serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and offers around-the-clock pour-over and all-you-can-eat snacks.

In addition to my personal office, there’s an outdoor patio and a second-floor deck with WiFi and pleasant views of the Santa Cruz mountains to gaze at while I do my heads-down work.

I also get to bring my dog, Pepper! She hates to be alone all day and now she gets to hang with me, take occasional walks and fetch breaks, and lay around on her pillow in the company of her familial pack.

My hours are flexible, which helps when it comes to shuttling kids to and from school and sports, or just finding a few minutes to hangout with my friends and family, exercise, or enjoy my hobbies.

The motorized adjustable-height base has four presets.

But let me tell you about my favorite thing of all: my custom handmade adjustable-height computer desk. The tabletop is made from a glorious slab of California Walnut, sustainably grown and milled by a local farmer in Santa Rosa, Calif. It still has it’s original “live edge” and it’s constructed with traditional mortise-and-tenon joinery cut by hand. I can sit or stand anytime because the desk has a motor that adjusts the height with the press of a button.

Here’s the best part: I got to build my custom Walnut desk from scratch in the woodshop next door! That’s right, my new office has its own woodworking studio for employees!

For those of you who have not cut through the satire just yet, I’ll come right out with it. My new office is my home office (and that woodshop is my garage woodshop).

Next week I start work at Automattic Inc., the company behind WordPress and a handful of other software platforms and services for publishing on the open web. Automattic bills itself as a “distributed” company with no corporate headquarters. Me and my 900+ co-workers live and work in more than 70 countries from our home offices, co-working spaces, and even a few Airstream campers.

After spending the past five years commuting to and from the towering glass and steel edifice of Silicon Valley’s most famous technology headquarters, Apple Inc., I’m surprisingly ready for the change. And I’ve already started thinking about that next woodworking project.

Two halves of a single Walnut slap are fit side by side with a wavy fault line that follows the live edge of the tree.

Generation Web

Every five years or so I start too seriously reflect on my life in terms of the world around me. Where am I? How did I get here? And what am I contributing toward it all? For me, it helps to put it into perspective with a story. A narrative of events often surfaces answer to questions that seemed murky without context.

Return of the Weekndr Family

It’s been more than seven years since I opened up the WordPress editor to post a blog entry here at Weekndr.com.

A lot has changed.

Our journey from Connecticut to Los Angeles continued with another move to sunny Silicon Valley, California. Now five years in, we’re here where the sun is hot, the rent is high, and the jobs are all about the tech: deep tech, consumer tech, bio tech, retail tech, transportation tech, health and wellness tech, pets and lifestyle tech… I could on.

The Secret Apple Years

Five years ago we arrived here for a new job at the Mecca of the Valley: Apple Inc. I joined a team of product marketing professionals to go out tell stories that sell iPhones. The years past, we told stories, I sold iPhones — and eventully iPads and Apple Watches, too. Until a few weeks ago when I turned in my badge and laptop and transformed myself into a iPhone buyer.

An Open Source Future

Next week I start a new job, with a new company, working in an industry that’s as familiar as an old friend. The folks at Automattic, the company behind the open-source software WordPress, has hired me to join a team called WordPress VIP, which helps large media companies, brands, and organizations run their websites.

If you don’t know what WordPress is, just look under the hood of this hear website. It’s powered by the open-source software platform along with a quarter of the webpages served worldwide.

Weekday and Weekndr Adventures

This blog is devoted to what we do on the weekends, hence its name. But my new gig also brings some interesting actives to the weekdays. Automattic is a so-called Distributed company, which means that all of its 900 employees work from remote locations. There’s no headquarters, no central office. All of us work via the open Internet, using mobile tools, video conferencing, and asynchronous communication tools like Slack. And when you need more human contact, hitch a Lyft or hop on an airplane and meet face-to-face.