In Case You Missed It – Issue 15

photo credit: Night Moves – (license)

There’s a lot of great WordPress content published in the community but not all of it is featured on the Tavern. This post is an assortment of items related to WordPress that caught my eye but didn’t make it into a full post.

Insight Into Automattic’s Open Vacation Policy

Alexis Croswell, of Culture Amp, published a great piece featuring Lori McLeese, HR Lead at Automattic. The article goes into detail on how Automattic manages its open vacation policy. What I find particularly interesting is how the company notifies and keeps track of employee vacation time.

Automattic uses one internal WordPress.com blog that lists everyone’s away from keyboard (vacation) dates. This blog is used by HR to pull information for reports sent to countries that require it for payroll. The vacation information is automatically populated to team calendars and blogs as well.

They also use Slack to notify each other when they’re on vacation, by putting the dates of their vacation into their profile.

Another interesting tidbit is that, in addition to the open vacation policy, employees are offered a paid sabbatical that lasts for two-three months every five years.

Performance Gains from Switching to Native System Fonts in WordPress

One of the highlights in WordPress 4.6 is the switch from Open Sans to native system fonts. By not loading fonts from Google, WordPress gains a slight performance boost. Peter Wilson shares data that shows a notable speed improvement especially over mobile.

Jenny Beaumont Shares Her Remote Work Experience

In preparation for Siobhan McKeown’s new book about Remote Work, Jenny Beaumont recalls what its been like to work remotely for the past several years.

You can’t get much more remote than the tiny village in the lower Manche where my husband and I moved in 2011. We are literally surrounded by cows and cornfields. The nearest train station is a 20-minute drive, as is pretty much every other convenience.

It’s a great read and I hope that one of these days I get to meet Jenny in person.

Facebook Changes Sharing Counts

Facebook released a new version of its API and changed the way in which shared posts are counted. They also disabled part of the API which is causing issues for a few plugins.

Mika Epstein published details on the Make WordPress Plugins site and is asking for the community’s help in identifying plugins that may be affected so she can contact the authors directly. Jetpack has already pushed out a new version that fixes Facebook’s sharing counts.

Torquemag Interviews Forest Mars, Co-Organizer of Open Camps

Earlier this year, WordCamp NYC took place and although it was a separate event, it was part of a larger initiative by the United Nations called Open Camps. Torquemag interviewed Forest Mars, co-organizer of Open Camps, where he describes what the event is and its purpose.

John James Jacoby Apologizes to Automattic

It’s not often you see someone publish an apology to one of their former employers for not being a good employee.

You gave me all of the things that, on paper, make a great career and environment. You gave me freedom and liberty to work at my own pace and learn — I mean really learn — how to work within a complex environment of systems, people, interests, wants & needs. I could have probably been happy with you for a very long time, and I think you would have been happy with me too, but I let my pride & vision of what I wanted for myself prevent that kind of relationship from ever really maturing.

WordSesh Starts Tonight

Don’t forget that WordSesh takes place this weekend and starts tonight at 8PM Eastern and ends at 8PM Eastern on Saturday, August 20th.

Ukranian Wapuu!

In what is a traditional part of this series, I end each issue by featuring a Wapuu design. For those who don’t know, Wapuu is the unofficial mascot of the WordPress project.

The organizers of WordCamp Kyiv held a competition to see who could create a Ukranian themed Wapuu. With 53.4% of the vote, I present Cossack Wapuula.

That’s it for issue fifteen. If you recently discovered a cool resource or post related to WordPress, please share it with us in the comments.