Automattic Grand Meetup 2015 – Day 2

I posted last night that I was going to skip the movie and hang out by the fire pits…but that only lasted about twenty minutes before I decided to go inside and check things out.   It was a lighter crowd in the movie room than I was expecting, and they hadn’t started playing it yet.  Instead they were just showing the Halloween Power Hour DVD that my friend Vanessa made a few years ago.  I’d given it to Asher (the guy organizing the movie), and he was using it as an intro while people filtered in.  Pretty cool, and definitely sets the mood.  I’m glad it made the cut.

Yesterday evening I gave my Flash Talk (a required <4 minute presentation on any topic), and it seemed to go over well.  I talked about the path I’ve been on for the last few years of turning into a coffee snob.  Although there are a lot of people here who are way more intense about their coffee than I am.  As I write this I’m drinking coffee I made in the hotel room automatic drip machine with a pre-ground packet of Starbucks.  I could wait and get slightly better coffee at breakfast, but I like having it in my room first so I can add MCT oil to boost my metabolism at the start of the day.

On tap for today:

• Breakfast meeting with my team lead, who I’ve been talking to online since May, but only just met in person yesterday.  When I first interviewed we did it all over Skype chat, sparingly in the evenings over the course of a couple weeks.  I thought that was standard (and it worked really well to do it asynchronously so I could maintain my schedule), but I found out yesterday that it was an experiment on his part, and normally they just schedule a time for an extended chat to get it all done at once.
• Flash Talks (glad mine is over with, so I’ll just be watching others)
• More “Let’s Build React Components” class – Having a lot of fun here…learning a lot, and it already helped get me over the initial hump of getting familiar with the React structure so I’m comfortable reading/writing the code now, even if I don’t know all the ins and outs yet.
• A8C Town Hall tonight – Basically an open forum where we talk about the future of the company