#141 – Christy Nyiri and Mike Straw on Automattic’s Special Projects Team

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, learning about the work of the Automattic Special Projects Team.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcasts players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Christy Nyiri and Mike Straw.

Christy leads the design arm of Automattic’s Special Projects Team. She taught herself to design and code 17 years ago, and has since worked with a wide range of clients, many of whom you’ll hear about later.

Mike is an engineer with the Special Projects Team. He’s been writing code for over four decades and has been deeply into WordPress for the last seven years.

Today we’re pulling back the curtain on the work done at Automattic’s Special Projects Team, a somewhat mysterious entity within Automattic. Because of its low visibility and its detachment from regular product output, many have never heard of the team or what they produce, but that is about to change.

Mike and Christy, tell us all about the team, what they do and who they work with and for. They clarify the unique operational model of the team, which resembles an internal agency focusing exclusively on WordPress and open source projects. Their mission isn’t driven purely by profit. They often support nonprofits and contribute back to the WordPress community.

We get into the team’s philosophy of learning from mistakes while striving for excellence. From there work with prominent websites, to assisting household names to more philanthropic work, Mike and Christy illustrates how their work showcases the power and versatility of WordPress. In short, they strive to show the very best that WordPress can produce.

This episode highlights the technical and design prowess of the Special Projects Team, but also captures the passion and dedication of its members.

Whether you’re a WordPress developer, a web design, enthusiastic, or someone interested in the operational intricacies of high caliber web projects, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Christy Nyiri and Mike Straw.

I am joined on the podcast by Christy Nyiri and Mike Straw. Hello both.

[00:03:28] Christy Nyiri: Hello.

[00:03:29] Mike Straw: Hello.

[00:03:31] Nathan Wrigley: We’re going to have a conversation today from WordCamp US. We are in one of the meeting rooms in Portland, Oregon. Christy and Mike have joined me today because they work on a really interesting team, which I don’t know much about. So they’re going to school me in how this all hangs together, and how it works.

Before we begin that though, Christy first, and then Mike afterwards, would you mind just giving us a little potted bio about yourselves. Maybe a minute, or something like that.

[00:03:55] Christy Nyiri: Yeah. Hey, I’m Christy Nyiri. I’m Canadian, but I live in Brooklyn now. I’ve been with Automattic for a little over four years, and it’s the longest job I’ve ever held. So that says something about Automattic as a company.

[00:04:08] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much Christy. And Mike, give us your little potted bio.

[00:04:12] Mike Straw: I’m Mike. I’m currently from Ohio, but I’m from everywhere. I traveled around a lot as a kid, and then in my adult life. But I joined Automattic about seven years ago, and I just joined the Special Projects Team two years ago. I kind of can’t hold down a job, so I keep changing places I work. I did that my whole life, changing jobs between company, or between organisations. And then in Automattic, I’ve kind of bounced around a little bit, and I’ve settled on the special projects team and I am pretty happy here.

[00:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so you’ve alluded to what we’re going to talk about today, Mike. You mentioned the Special Projects Team. It’s kind of an interesting name. It sort of feels a little bit shrouded in mystery. I don’t know, it almost feels like special forces in in the army, or something like that. You know, this is the team that we deploy when things get a little bit tricky, when things are complicated.

I don’t know if that’s the feeling that you guys get, but it does feel as if what you are working on is, let’s say, at a higher level than any of the websites I ever built. Put it that way.

So the first question, and either of you can tackle this. What is the Special Projects Team, and which kind of clients do you work with?

[00:05:18] Christy Nyiri: So the Automattic Special Projects Team, I’ll read our little mission statement. We just help interesting people, projects, and organisations have a great experience with WordPress.

[00:05:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, perfect. Can you name drop? Are you allowed to name drop any of the kind of projects that you’ve worked on before?

[00:05:32] Christy Nyiri: For sure. You can see a bunch of the projects on our website, which is specialprojects.automattic.com. The biggest one that I worked with personally was Print Magazine, which is like a publication that has been around since the 1940s, and it has a big history in the design community.

[00:05:48] Mike Straw: Some of the ones I really were proud of is End The Backlog. Which was about backlogs of sexual assault in the country, because they won a Webby for their work. The website won a Webby, and the work they’re doing has actually had real impact, like the numbers and the charts since they started has actually stopped this backlog that’s going on. So it was like a real social life impact. And I have some background in that field, so I’m really passionate about it. So seeing that happen was really cool.

Also, the site we talked about, one of the sites we talked about yesterday was Johan Ernst the explorer, his website, and just the amazing experience of the site itself. The work is pretty amazing.

Post Secret is another really cool one that we’ve worked on. There’s a list, we have, what is it, over 450 production sites running now that we’ve built over the years. And it’s actually a fun experience having only been here for two years to periodically go on a website and say, hey, wait a minute, that’s one of our websites. Because I still don’t know the list completely.

[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you for that. That’s great. So we know that some of the websites that you’re building have impact. Sounds like some of them, especially meaningful to you in particular there, Mike. That’s really nice.

What’s the purpose of the team though? So, as an example, if I rocked up to the special projects team, and just said, I have a brochure website for a local veterinary practice in the town where I live. I’m guessing that, at some point, you’re going to filter me out, maybe I don’t qualify as special.

And I just wonder, is there a criteria? Is it, I don’t know, is there a criteria based upon the depth of your pockets, or the type of projects, or the industry you are in, or is it maybe just more, well, there’s a notorious company? Everybody’s heard of those, so they qualify as special. What is the criteria that gets you in?

[00:07:35] Christy Nyiri: Well, we’ve done projects for a huge range of people, like from very high profile projects to, honestly, there is, not a vet, but we have a site for an animal adoption agency that I think is actually just a girl. A young girl, a teenager, and we built her a website.

So the project has come to us through referrals from other partners that have already existed, and from other Automatticians as well. So if anyone at the company has a project they think would fit with our mission, we can work on that too.

[00:08:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So yeah, there’s definitely some sort of criteria there. But it seems, I was probably missing the target a little bit. So it really isn’t necessarily to do with the depth of the pockets, or the fact that you are notorious, it really could be anything.

[00:08:17] Christy Nyiri: It really can, yeah.

[00:08:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s fascinating. In the presentation blurb that went along with the presentation that you gave yesterday, one of the phrases that you used was, well, you said, connecting partners with the best that the WordPress community has to offer. And as soon as I hear the word WordPress community, I kind of imagine the crowd that we’re amongst here. Everybody shows up, everybody has their turn, you know, anybody can speak here, anybody can attend here.

But the sort of slightly exclusive nature of the word special, and the kind of projects that you deal with, how is that connection made? Do you feed back things to the WordPress community? So I’m just wondering if you could unpack that sentence for me.

[00:08:54] Mike Straw: There’s a lot there, because we really are, we’re part of the WordPress community. We are not primarily about making money, but the way I like to word it is, we are here to make WordPress look good.

We bring things to our partners, we give them the best experience, with the best website we can build for them, and give them the best experience we can for using WordPress.

So we choose tools, we’re really big on, like right now using block editor, and all that technology. We’ve been doing a lot of even no code builds, or low code builds, only building like specific functionality that has to be coded up, but using the block editor, and using the tools so that it’s just there. And then when they’re working on their website later, they just go in the editor, and click, and it’s done. So very simple. So it’s making the WordPress experience a good experience.

And then we also, on the other side of it, we try to give back to the community as much as we can. If we do use a plugin, as an example, I was recently on a project where I found a bug in a plugin that we had installed on a site that was a wordpress.org plugin. I went in, I was like, this is the problem, here’s the bug. And I fixed it inside, so we could get the site going. And then I went on to their forum and said, hey, we found a bug, here’s the bug, here’s how I fixed it. And then they’re like, cool, thank you, and the next release had the fix.

And we do that with community plugins. We do that with our own products. You know, we’ll obviously, we’ll promote Automattic products for them to use. And if there’s a problem with the product, we’ll go to the product team and say, we found this. The dog fooding experience, that we dog food pretty much everything that Automattic has to offer. And we find a problem, and we say, we’ll go to the product team and say, here’s the bug we found. And sometimes we’ll also say, here’s the PR to fix the code.

[00:10:43] Nathan Wrigley: So it’s kind of like a double pronged thing, in that you are creating things, but then contributing back, maybe improvements to existing things, but also perhaps creating your own functionality and allowing the WordPress repository to get a hold of that. But also, I suppose the community piece there is that you are creating exceptional websites, exceptional experiences, which then are a kind of advert, if you like, for WordPress as a tool, like a showcase almost. You know, the things that you produce, I’m guessing are of, without blowing your own trumpets, you would probably regard them as of high quality, and good examples of what WordPress itself can do.

And I do feel at this moment in time, we’re recording this in 2024, that we do have, not a credibility problem, but we are competing in a marketplace where the tools that are out there, which you can pay, I don’t know, $20 a month for, we know what we’re talking about, these SaaS-based tools. They are beginning to be popular. They’ve got television adverts, they have giant marketing budgets. So one of the ways that I guess WordPress can promote itself is with exceptional websites that people can look at. So, I don’t know if you’ve got anything you want to add to that.

[00:11:48] Mike Straw: Yeah. I think, internally, because you know we have our own internal team names. Our team is called Team 51, which sounds as mysterious and strange, and secretive as Special Projects. But really the 51 is for 51%. And that is, we want WordPress to have 51% of the internet. And we’re doing that by doing things like this because, and this is me personally editorialising a little of, before I came to WordPress, WordPress does kind of have a reputation issue sometimes, because the average external person hears of these suss hosting sites, or because anybody can extend it, anybody can write a plugin.

And you get a plugin in there that’s junk, and then the WordPress experience is junk, and then they’re saying WordPress is junk. And so we’re trying to highlight, no, WordPress itself is a solid tool, a solid platform, and if you develop well on it, you will have a solid site. And so we do a lot of that just to kind of build the reputation.

[00:12:46] Christy Nyiri: I’d like to add that, on the design side of things, someone came up to me after the talk yesterday and said, how does WordPress compete with the other platforms out there that are really design focused? And I think that is what we’re trying to do on our team, is show that you can build really well designed websites with WordPress, and using the block editor.

It is a more recent thing, I will admit, the block editor only really came to maturity maybe in the last year. And up until then, like I was even very anti-block theme. As a developer I’m like, I can build it better in PHP, like I know what I’m doing. But like now that you can adjust padding, and negative margins, and all those things, it’s an actual tool that you can use to build nice looking things.

There is some work that needs to be done, but it’s getting there. And we’re confident that the more that we show sites that we build, that are full, non headless builds, like straight block themes, that it’ll inspire other people to do the same.

[00:13:39] Mike Straw: One of the things I will often tell people is, I think I’m a pretty good engineer, I am a terrible designer. So you tell me what to make a website look like and do, and I will make it do it. If you look at my websites that I have put together, they are disgustingly ugly because a designer has not looked at them.

With the block editor, I’ve gotten better. I’m able to actually make it look pretty decent because it does a lot of that for me. But it’s that thing of, if you have something that’s only going to be built by engineers, it’s going to look like something an engineer built. If you build it like anybody would build a website on any other platform, where you have designers that design, and make the look, and the branding, and you get the marketing in there, whatever team you have, and then the engineers are building what they have said make it look like, you end up with something that’s nice and pretty.

And WordPress, I think, has always had that capability, although it required a lot more engineering work historically. But now, I think it’s amazing now that we now have project builds that, I think we’ve had some that just had no engineer involvement now.

[00:14:37] Nathan Wrigley: Oh wow. Because the blocks are good enough.

[00:14:39] Mike Straw: Our designers design it, our account managers build it in the block editor, and then they’re done.

[00:14:44] Nathan Wrigley: It feels a bit like Team 51 is a website building agency, buried within Automattic then. So again, just to let me understand it a little bit more, we’ve got designers, Christy’s a designer. We’ve got developers, Mike is a developer. And it sounded like you mentioned marketing as well. There’s marketing people as well? What I’m trying to get to with that question, is it almost like an agency buried inside of Automattic?

[00:15:09] Christy Nyiri: Yeah, you’re hitting the nail right on the head. Our team does operate on an agency model. There’s a couple of other teams at Automattic that do as well. One being VIP, and now the other one is lost on me. Oh, The Design Core, they’re kind of like do all our internal brand stuff.

So Team 51, we are composed of designers, engineers, and project managers, which we call TAMS, AKA Technical Account Managers. And we also have an operations team. All of us like work together to build sites, as any traditional agency would.

[00:15:40] Mike Straw: The marketing was an example of how a company would build a website. But yeah, for us internally, some of the partners we bring in have a marketing branch, and we will work with them to do the designing. But yeah, we don’t do marketing ourselves within the team.

[00:15:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And I think I’m right in saying that the WP Tavern website, and if you are listening to this, there’s a high chance that either you’re on an RSS reader, and you’re listening to this on a podcast player, or you’re on the WP Tavern website. I think the Tavern website is one of your projects.

[00:16:10] Mike Straw: I believe so.

[00:16:10] Christy Nyiri: Yeah. Yeah, I remember working on that, or working with other people who were working on it. But yeah, we did that a few years ago, but it was before block themes. I think it’s actually probably due for a revamp to create a block theme version of it.

[00:16:24] Nathan Wrigley: I’m going to be in your inbox.

Okay, let’s go in this direction. If we’re going to categorise your team as special, which is obviously the name. What is special? What do you bring to the table that any other agency out there might not? I am not trying to put you up against, or make you give me a competitive analysis statement of how you’re different. But what are some of the things that you’ve noticed in your time there, which really does separate it out as a special thing?

[00:16:47] Christy Nyiri: Yeah, I think the biggest thing with our team is that we’re just like really WordPress focused, and involved in the community, and the open source nature of WordPress, which a lot of like other larger agencies, building larger sites, aren’t. They’re doing headless builds using whatever sort of build processes they are, and we’re like hardcore, a hundred percent block themes. So that’s one special thing about us.

[00:17:08] Mike Straw: And, while we use the agency model, we don’t directly operate like an agency. An agency is a company trying to make money by building websites. So they’re going to try to do the things that are going to help them bring in good income, and that’s kind of what they’re thinking about.

We are more, even though we operate on that model, that’s how we interact with partners that we’re working on with websites and things like that. The things we’re doing is not to extract funding from them. Again, it’s about us making a project that shines, and does good things, and makes a site that they will be proud of and brag to their friends about. And so we don’t operate in that.

And we’re also just, the entire team is people that are just really, really passionate about WordPress. We want to make it look good. We want to give the best that we have to our partners, to the community. It’s not unusual, when we discover a bug or a glitch, there’s somebody within minutes saying, okay, who do we need to talk to, to make sure this works right for everybody else that’s running into this.

[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: Do you end up doing sort of some philanthropic work as well? Because this is something buried within Automattic, and Automattic as we know, the three of us at least do, and dear listener, if you don’t, you can go and explore what Automattic do. They’ve got multiple revenue streams, and so a traditional agency, I’m imagining their revenue stream is client work. And the fact that Automattic has other revenue streams, does that make it possible for you to do website builds that aren’t necessarily going to be, air quotes, profitable? That perhaps you could describe as, I don’t know, philanthropic?

A good example may be The Tavern actually because, as far as I’m aware, it doesn’t, there’s no revenue stream coming out of The Tavern. The decision has been made to keep a news organisation for WordPress going, and it’s being kept alive by your team, but there’s no revenue stream there. So I’m wondering, do you have that? Is it possible for you to do things on a more philanthropic nature because of the funding system that you’ve got?

[00:19:03] Christy Nyiri: Yeah, I think exactly what you’re saying. We are not like a profits based team. We work on just trying to showcase the best of what WordPress can do. And so we definitely have done sites for partners that are nonprofits, and we help them build their web presence online.

[00:19:22] Mike Straw: I think End The Backlog is a great example of that. There’s a lot of ones that are just, they’re not profit making entities. They’re just groups that are trying to do better things in the world, and we’re providing some service to that. We’re not necessarily we’re not like, this is a good, although that comes into the equation, it’s not a, we’re doing this because it’s a good social justice thing or something, but it’s a good place we can work. But the outcome is definitely there of enabling these organisations to be able to do things that they might not otherwise be able to do because of financial considerations.

[00:19:55] Nathan Wrigley: But it does sound then as if the overall purpose of the special projects team then, and we did allude to this a little bit ago, but we probably could go a little bit further, is to act like a bit of a showcase for WordPress, and just to sort of exemplify the very best of what it can do.

And I don’t know if you’ve got like one place, one domain where we can go, and look at the work that you’ve done, or if it’s more of, no, you’ll have to be a bit inventive, and Google, and contact us, and we’ll tell you what we’ve built.

But it does feel like that’s the point. Here’s a big property. Here’s an important thing, whether it’s philanthropic or not, and we’re going to churn out the best that WordPress can do, and thereby, sort of vicariously let the community know, here’s WordPress. Here’s how credible it is. Here’s the kind of people with the stature that they’ve got who are using it.

[00:20:41] Mike Straw: As of this week, you can go to specialprojects.automattic.com, which has a list of websites, showcases. It actually has some of the tools we’ve built, and some of the blocks that we’ve got out there.

Going back to contributing to the WordPress community, there’s a pull request to put our Accordion Block into Gutenberg Core.

But actually, going back to that whole showcasing idea, the actual way back origins of this team go back to when Matt was working for CNET and building WordPress. And he would build WordPress sites for his friends and say, here’s a site I made in WordPress, isn’t WordPress cool? I’m not quoting him. I don’t know what he actually said exactly, but that’s the gist of what was happening.

But that was kind of how, when we were starting as a team back in the day, a lot of times it was a, we’d see a site hosted on, I don’t know if it was around back then, but a Wix or a Squarespace kind of environment, and we’d be like, we could make that in WordPress.

The team would build a WordPress site mirroring that site, and then go to that person and say, look, we made a WordPress site, this is probably going to be a lot easier for you to work with than wherever you are. And that’s kind of the origins of, literally, let’s make WordPress look good by building good WordPress sites.

[00:21:53] Nathan Wrigley: Forgive me for sort of making this assumption, but it seems like you’re both quite happy with the work that you are doing. It’s got value, there’s some credibility to the work that you’re doing. I mean, that kind of stuff going on a CV looks nice, right?

And I’m just wondering if somebody listening to this has the thought that, I think I’m doing good work, I think I have that caliber in me.

How did you end up dropping into this team? Was it that you were Automatticians already? You may have touched on this in your bio at the beginning, I can’t remember. Is there a way that you can find yourself into this team? Do you hire externally? There’s a lot in there, but just tell us what you can.

[00:22:27] Mike Straw: Can I say yes?

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’ll do it.

[00:22:30] Mike Straw: Because I think we have very different experiences. You got hired into 51. So we’d had very different experiences on this, and I think from both ways of, I came in, I got hired by Automattic about seven years ago. Basically rediscovered WordPress, went to a conference, became a happiness engineer doing wordpress.com support.

And then, I think I said earlier, I kind of can’t hold down a job. I switched from wordpress.com support to doing WooCommerce support. And then I went through, we had an internal developer apprenticeship program that I went through, back to engineering, and worked as an engineer on the woocommerce.com website.

But back when I was a wordpress.com happiness engineer, one of the sites came in for support, who happens to be one of my favorite authors. So I saw her site, and actually it was a, she made a post on her blog of, I’m having a problem with my like button or something. I’m like, oh, well I have the access, I’m doing support, I can go check on it. And I went in, and I start reading, and it had this little flag on it saying, this is a Team 51 site.

So I went and looked. It’s like, you contact these people. I was like, okay, what is this Team 51? Are they alien secret people? I don’t know because I hadn’t, I was new enough, I didn’t know who they were. And so I messaged someone, I was like, here’s the thing. And then we got chatting, and he started talking about what they’re doing. I’m like, oh my gosh, I want to, this just sounds really cool.

And once an opportunity came in, after I was an engineer for a while, and then they just happened to have an internal thing saying, we’re looking for some engineers. And I was like, hello, please, yes, and contacted them and then got in. So we do some of that internal hiring kind of thing. But also, and I think Christy can talk more about getting from the outside.

[00:24:09] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So there is internal, there’s mechanisms internally within Automattic to make your way toward the team. But Christy’s got a different story.

[00:24:15] Christy Nyiri: I guess I didn’t say this earlier, but I lead the design arm of Special Projects. When I got involved with Automattic I was, like I’ve been designing and developing websites, self-taught for like, I don’t know, 17, 18 years now. And I started with WordPress about 17 years ago, when it was so young.

And it was like February, 2020, and I was looking for a full-time role somewhere, and I had a friend who was on the Tumblr engineering team at the time. And he’s like, why don’t you just apply at Automattic? And I was like, oh, okay.

And then I applied, and went through the whole trial, and the interview. And the interview was for a product designer. And I don’t really do product design. I’m a web, UI person. But I went through the trial expecting eventually like, to get an offer, it would be as the product designer. And they were like, oh, actually we have this team for you, we think you’d be good on, it’s called Team 51. And like I had the same reaction as Mike, Team 51, what is that? It sounds mysterious.

And I kind of like looked on the website that they had, and looked at who was on the team, and Jeffrey Zeldman was on the team at the time. Oh my God, if I get to work with Jeffrey Zeldman, like, amazing. And so I was thrilled to get hired at that time.

But I was the first internal designer on the team at that point. They didn’t really have anyone else. They were working with some contractors who’s, a lot of them are still with us. We’ve now grown from just me, to like three other internal designers on our team. So the benefit for my design side of the team is that having internal designers means they can work on internal projects, and they’re more closely associated with the brand. So they can do like Automattic brand things as well. Because like, in addition to the websites, sometimes we do other projects. I am involved in kind of a rebrand for Automattic. There will be something coming hopefully in the next year or so in that end.

[00:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: Would it be fair to say then, if I find a website and the logo of Automattic is at the bottom of the footer, would that be something that is likely to have been done by your team?

[00:26:07] Christy Nyiri: Some of them, yeah. Not all of them. We do some internal builds, but there’s definitely ones we haven’t done.

[00:26:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, so it’s not guaranteed, but it’s a probable. Do you find yourself involved in Automattic properties that have got nothing to do with WordPress as well? So, I don’t know, things like Pocket Casts and, dare I say it, Tumblr, things like that.

[00:26:25] Mike Straw: We’ve built Tumblr sites as part of it. We’ve had a couple people just kind of get directly involved on building Tumblr themes. One of the ones, the first time I heard that we were doing that was actually the Jonas Brothers were going on tour, and one of the leads I’ve had, it was actually built that theme.

And I think that might’ve been the, was that the first one we did? I know they came back. But we built the theme for the Jonas Brothers when they went on tour. And I think there were some others that we’ve built. We’ve built Tumblrs for partners, like along with the sites, or things like that. So yeah, we’ve worked with Tumblr. I don’t know that we’ve done anything with Pocket Casts. That’s what I listen to your podcast on.

[00:27:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, yeah. That’s my podcast player of choice as well.

[00:27:05] Mike Straw: Oh, we built, that’s right, we did. We built the Pocket Cast Blog. We just recently moved that over.

[00:27:09] Nathan Wrigley: Automattic seems like it’s on a clip of purchasing things. So in the more recent past, I can think of Beeper and Texts, and maybe they’re the kind of things that in the future will come under your purview as well. I don’t know.

[00:27:18] Mike Straw: If there’s a website, if it’s an Automattic branded site that belongs to it, we tend to be involved in building those sites, and getting them up and running, or doing a redesign and migration of the site into the Automattic platform.

I’ve worked, personally spent some time on akismet.com, jetpack.com, automattic.com, I think I’ve done a little bit of work there. So like those internal sites, we do work with those. And yeah, I had forgotten, we migrated the Pocket Cast Blog.

[00:27:45] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Now, I’m guessing the fact that you’ve got, both of you, this incredible heritage, and you’re obviously surrounded by people of an equal caliber. I’m guessing that the kind of work that you put out means that it has to be of the highest quality. And if somebody was to be thinking, I’d like to work with that team, you have to have really high expectations here. Nothing can go out the door that isn’t as good as it possibly can be.

I don’t really have a question in there, but I’m just sort of asking, is that the case? Do you feel that you are doing the best work that you can do with everything that you put out? No corners cut, go the extra mile, do the extra work, that kind of thing. I’m getting some smiles.

[00:28:22] Mike Straw: That sounds really high stress.

[00:28:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I wondered if it was.

[00:28:25] Mike Straw: So there’s a kind of a philosophy within Automattic of, you’re allowed to make mistakes. As a matter of fact, I said earlier, I went through an apprenticeship program to become an engineer again, because I’ve been doing some sort of coding for decades. But it was always smaller projects, and I knew when I came to Automattic, there was no way I could operate at the scale and the level that Automattic operates at.

So I came in as a support person, and then when they had the opportunity for me to go learn this, and when I started my apprenticeship, I actually, I was going to work on the woocommerce.com website. And as part of my apprenticeship, no pressure there, far as I know, the largest WooCommerce site on the internet, and I said something to my lead. Something about, as long as I don’t crash the site. And he says, oh no, it’s not a matter of if you’re going to crash the site, it’s when. And I fulfilled that. I only crashed it once, so that was good.

Yeah, and I’ve made mistakes on Team 51. I’ve made some that had some impact. I wish I hadn’t, but I did. And I learned from it, and will never do that again, and had learned things as I went. It’s definitely not a, we’re cavalier, work fast, break things, as some companies operate in. It’s, we are very careful, but we also acknowledge the fact that we are human beings that are going to make mistakes, especially because we’re operating at the cutting edge of things.

A new thing comes in WordPress, or is coming in WordPress, a lot of times we’ll start implementing it, and using it, and sometimes things don’t go perfectly. And we have an internal system to make sure that if something does go wrong, we’re quick to get it fixed, quick to get everything back to working well. But yeah, we do want to give the best. We do all absolutely always give the very best we have to what we’re doing. We don’t have an expectation of perfection in that. We have an expectation of, I would say an expectation of excellence, but not of perfection, if that makes sense.

[00:30:19] Christy Nyiri: Well, I have an expectation of perfection in design. I’d say it’s like really hard in design to get things to the level that I really want them to be. That mostly comes down to just like the really little, this finessing at the end of the build, the CSS details. That’s what I love. Like I’m a huge CSS nerd, and because I’ve built most sites, like up until working in Automattic, my background is that I would do it myself, and do those afterwards, and it’s hard for me to kind of like translate that to a developer a lot of the time.

But other people on my team that are younger, and have better, I guess like development handoff practices, are really good at like translating to a dev. Like, here’s the animation I want to see, here’s the details that I want on the site. And the site that Mike mentioned earlier, johanernst.com, so that’s. J-O-H-A-N-E-R-N-S-T, and I want everyone to see the site because it is, I think, the most perfect example of what we’ve built. It’s like a super high caliber, and all the little details on it. And they’re still even adding more. Like they’re going to add, on the site there’s this globe, and then we’re going to add a connector of the expeditions around the globe, so you can see the kind of like route that he’s taken. It’s such a good site, check it out.

[00:31:34] Mike Straw: Going back to the perfection idea, I’m going to amend a little bit, or with what Christy said, the perfection of the design, and the way the sites look, that is a thing. We try to give them the absolute best site. And I learned that on one website we worked on, that we got the initial site delivered, and then the QA went on for the design QA, and I was one of the people that worked on the couple of hundred issues that they found with the design.

A lot of it was, this is shaded a little different, this is just a couple of pixels out of alignment when you’re with this particular, like it was very, very detailed design. Making the site look perfect. Making things absolutely the best it can be. So there is that standard of the site we deliver. I was looking more from an engineering perspective of perfect code is not a thing, and sometimes there is a belief that you have to just do everything perfect, and if you make something go wrong, that’s just the end of everything. And we don’t have that mindset. We work very, very, very hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.

The presentation I gave yesterday about the safety net plugin we have, comes from that mindset of, we want to never risk doing something that’s going to impact our partners, or any of our websites in a negative way. WordPress is a very large code base, it’s not perfect. But our standards for what we deliver very much are very, very detailed.

[00:33:04] Nathan Wrigley: In preparation for this podcast, I actually asked a few Automatticians if they had any idea what your team does.

[00:33:10] Christy Nyiri: Nobody does.

[00:33:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and not only did they not know, many of them didn’t know that it was a thing, the Special Projects Team. So I think the cabal like nature of it, it is interesting. There is this perception that, okay, they live in a different warehouse over there, and they’ve got chemicals boiling in test tubes, and things like that. But it’s kind of interesting, this podcast, peeling it back a little bit, and just realising sort of more human nature of it.

[00:33:34] Mike Straw: It is kind of that way, but not by design. It just kind of happened that way, because we are so small, and we have such a small thing. So it’s just not really visible necessarily every day to things that are going on, because we’re not necessarily putting out product, and things like that.

So I could see where people, well, again, both of us kind of had that perception before we actually came to the team of this big, mysterious thing. And, no, it’s just really people that really love doing cool stuff.

[00:34:01] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like the caliber of work that you’re doing is of great interest to you both. You seem to enjoy the space that you’re in. And obviously, the difficulty that comes with that is understood. I will into the show notes put any of the links that we mentioned today, including the, and I’m going to call it showcase, I don’t know if that was the right word, of the kind of sites that the team have been building.

But really fascinating just pulling back the curtain a little bit, and hopefully, off the back of this episode, some people will reach out to wherever they need to reach out to, to see how they can become involved. You never know, you might find some job applications coming through.

Thank you so much for talking to me today. Honestly, really interesting just pulling back the curtain a little bit on the team that you are involved in, and hopefully making it feel a bit less cabal like, in the process. So, Christy and Mike, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:34:48] Mike Straw: Absolutely. Thank you, this has been fun.

[00:34:49] Christy Nyiri: Yeah, thanks so much.

On the podcast today we have Christy Nyiri and Mike Straw.

Christy leads the design arm of Automattic’s Special Projects Team. She taught herself to design and code 17 years ago and has since worked with a wide range of clients, many of whom you’ll hear about later.

Mike is an engineer with the Special Projects Team. He’s been writing code for over four decades, and has been deeply into WordPress for the last seven years.

Today, we’re pulling back the curtain on the work done at Automattic’s Special Projects Team, a somewhat mysterious entity within Automattic. Because of its low visibility and its detachment from regular product output, many have never heard of the team or what they produce, but that’s about to change.

Mike and Christy tell us all about the team. What they do, and who they work with and for. They clarify the unique operational model of the team, which resembles an internal agency, focusing exclusively on WordPress and open-source projects. Their mission isn’t driven purely by profit; they often support nonprofits and contribute back to the WordPress community.

We get into the team’s philosophy of learning from mistakes while striving for excellence. From their work with prominent websites, to assisting household names, to more philanthropic work, Mike and Christy illustrate how their work showcases the power and versatility of WordPress. In short, they strive to show the very best that WordPress can produce

This episode highlights the technical and design prowess of the Special Projects Team, but also captures the passion and dedication of its members.

Whether you’re a WordPress developer, a web design enthusiast, or someone interested in the operational intricacies of high-calibre web projects, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Automattic Special Projects Team

PRINT magazine

End The Backlog

Johan Ernst

Post Secret

Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts Blog

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