So many things…

Last week was our all company meetup in Park City, Utah. We rarely had more than a couple of minutes pause throughout the entire seven-day get-together. We spent the time working, eating, and having fun (not so much sleeping). As a distributed company, we don’t normally have much time to “rag-chew” or “shoot-the-breeze.” It seems kind of crazy that we could be “busy” having fun together, but this is the time in which we build the relationships that make our teams work. It’s pretty valuable to get to know the people you interact with and these meetups foster good communication.

Four hundred of us came from all over; some had traveled over thirty hours jumping through airports and over oceans. I was thankful to hangout with friends I’ve made over the past year and a half and glad to meet new ones. I’m really surrounded by amazing people at Automattic. We’ve got such an incredible mix of people from various background and interests and skills and it’s pretty unbelievable to cram all that together in one place.

Now that I’m back in the United States, my team stays in pretty good contact due to timezones overlapping – we hail from Buenos Aires, Nashville, San Francisco, Seattle, and Tucson. That’s it for now though as we won’t see each other again until next year.

This year at the meetup was a bit busier than last year for me because I was leading a project group and we had to come up with something and demonstrate it at the end of the week. We made some tools to make making tools easier for developers. Programming for programmers to make programming easier. Anyway, long story short we were helping make it easier to write better code and evaluate the quality of code different developers submit day in and day out.

When I did finally get some free time I took to the skies! Actually, I took my camera out to shoot the skies, but it sounds better that way. I also had the chance to tag along on a photo tour through the Albion Basin with a professional photographer guide.

Jon was described to me by his teammates as, “a genius,” and he certainly is.

Where am I? I’m high. No, not high on drugs – high on a ski lift mast.

At our last stop on the tour we caught the rain.

Rodrigo is the newest member of my team and lives in Buenos Aires. He’s more of a geek than anyone I know (and that’s to his credit!) He was in the US before the meetup in order to attend his second Comic-Con of the year.

Who’s that guy?

Sam is another genuine and lovable guy. He’s done a little of everything.

David the photographer gave us lots of ideas to make a mediocre scene stand out. Placing a leaf on this stone and pouring water over it was one of them.

Supreme views

Textures in the rock: smooth and marbled.

My good friend Donncha (“Dennis” in Irish) who constantly inspires me and challenges me with my photographic hobby. He’s the first employee at Automattic and the only one with a ten-year tenure, the age of the company this year.

Donncha and Rodrigo

Throughout the week we fed on nutrition, coffee, and adrenaline. I probably tallied an average of three and a half hours of sleep each night and totally hit it hard when I returned to Tucson. I was out and a little bit under the weather, but a few good nights of sleep restored me (for more adventurous fun at an educational hackathon). It’s pretty amazing the kind of tradeoffs we can make (for a short bit of time). Oh yeah, and watch out for those Automattic parties – we’re a rowdy bunch!

Clicky Steve put together an excellent photo journal of the week on his blog, all my friends are jpegs.