From birth, Mike Stott, a true entrepreneur, literally couldn’t wait to start tackling challenges. He joined Jetpack in a less-than-conventional way and now spends each day serving fellow entrepreneurs by developing the tools they need to succeed on WordPress. 

See how he turned a passion into a career, the surprising reason he had to rebrand his most famous product, and just how little his family actually knows about his job. 

Just over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic began, many throughout the world have begun to consider a permanent work-from-home arrangement. We wanted to share what works for our teams because, as a distributed company, Jetpack has always been mindful of ways to stay connected despite fairly substantial differences in physical locations. You might think that nearly four years of practice with this kind of work arrangement gave us an advantage when COVID-19 forced everyone to distance. That’s partially true. 

Most of us, for example, already had our at-home work spaces ready to go. In August, we wrote about what we had already learned from years of working this way. We discussed creating the ideal environment, helpful tools and equipment, how to deal with distractions and optimize scheduling, the challenges of working with kids at home, and how to pay proper attention to physical and mental health. 

It’s probably fair to say that if you have a tattoo that says “CODE IS POETRY” on one arm and a Wapuu on the other, you’re probably pretty passionate about WordPress. 

This ink belongs to Eric Binnion, Lead Developer for Jetpack; this phrase is at the bottom of every WordPress.org page; and Wapuu is the cuddly Japanese manga-style mascot for WordPress.

We sat down with Binnion, who joined Automattic as a Code Wrangler in 2014, to talk code, Jetpack, partnerships, and more. 

COVID-19 is simultaneously keeping us apart while fusing many of us together in new, shared experiences — drastic lifestyle changes, an expanded vocabulary (“social distancing,” “flattening the curve”), and the world of working from home. 

Without warning or time to prep, huge chunks of the world were thrust into what our parent company’s CEO Matt Mullenweg called, “the remote work experiment no one asked for.” 

Remote work isn’t our new normal, it’s what we were doing even before Automattic officially ditched its San Francisco office (15,000 barely-used square feet) in 2016. Automattic employees (or as we call ourselves, Automatticians), work remotely from all over the world — 76 countries to be exact. We have data analysts and graphic designers, developers, marketing professionals and Happiness Engineers (our support team). 

Helping the world embrace the idea of a distributed workforce is a mission of Matt’s — it’s why he created the Distributed Blog and Podcast — but it’s also a passion for our entire team. Those of us at Jetpack want to share what we’ve learned (and are still learning) about working from home. We put out a company-wide call for people to share their best tips, most effective practices, and favorite advice.