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Today was one of the days where I was particularly thankful I worked remotely and with a company that trusts me to manage my time.

6AM – 8AM 

I woke up at a hotel where I stayed the night with a friend of mine who was in town. No, this is not The Hangover Part 3. Just another perk of being able to work wherever my computer is. I rolled out of bed and opened my computer. I spent this time period prepping for the day (made a Workflowy list), reading p2s/02s, and closing out easy support tickets. I try to avoid doing overly technical work too early in the morning if my mind is not fully awake aka I haven’t had coffee yet.

8AM – 9:30AM

Followed by a ton of previous reading, I devoured a breakfast at the hotel. I then drove back to my parents’ home where my dog was overjoyed to discover that I had not abandoned him.

9:30AM – 10:30AM

My parents were headed to Utah today and I had the honor of being their personal driver. After mooching off of them for two weeks, it was only fair I drove them to the airport. On the way back, I snagged some coffee and got jazzed up for the day.

10:30AM – 5:PM

With music blaring through the house, I put my feet up and enjoyed the freedom of being parentless at home. Since everyday I end up learning something new, I thought I’d share briefly what I learned today working on VaultPress support:

• Traceroutes: I had never “messed around” with these before. I also found this cool site that looks at traceroutes around the world.
• I learned about each of our security threats and messages (found the entire list today)
• Having include() using the $_POST superglobal is SUPER dangerous.

• I learned how to better troubleshoot this error when we ping a site: 404:405 Method Not Allowed.

All of a sudden around 1pm, we hit 0 tickets! Dancing man was on in all of his glory. This called for signing into Live Chat 🙂 I personally LOVE live chat. I think it provides both a better experience for the user and helps me hone in on my skills. Until 5pm, I was working on the internal situational/error doc I’ve been cranking away at, answering live chats, and working on any ticket that did trickle in. Midway through, I checked in with my buddy. He is on support rotation and taking a break from his role on the Theme Team. Automattic does a great job of pairing people up like this while they are on a rotation. Basically, my job is to be his go-to person in case he has any questions or concerns. In reality, I am pinging him once a day to chat about tools I use, how live chat can be intimidating, and funny moments that have happened while trying to juggle three chats at a time. All in all, I am really enjoying have buddy this week. So much so that I just signed up to be a buddy for someone for when the Data team does a support rotation 🙂

5pm-6PM

Run time. I was sore from yesterday’s work out and ended up just going on a quick run around the neighborhood. It was a hot yet beautiful Florida day. When I got back, I made dinner and sat down to finish a documentary on Netflix called “Crime after Crime”. Watch it but have tissues at hand. I found it to be incredibly powerful to say the least.

6PM -9PM

I spoke with the other full time HE on VaultPress about internal documentation I’ve been writing when he suggested I dive into the external documents. For some reason, I had been focusing so much on getting my bearings that I forgot I could work to improve what we have externally as well! As a result, I revamped the Security Threats page. Once that was done, I dove into some tickets and started writing this post. While writing, I got to chat with two lovely other automatticians that I had bonded with at the Grand Meetup (read more about the Grand Meetup here). While it may seem tough not to see your coworkers day in and day out, automatticians sure do know how to make their presence felt in the best way possible. Talking to them all day every day is SUCH a pleasure.

Alas, another awesome day has come to a close. Where has the time gone?!

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