2009 April « Naoko McCracken

Working with Automattic (And a Little History of WordPress in Japan)

I thought it’s appropriate to post this here.

I just started working with Automattic (the company behind wordpress.com and many other cool products and services) on a contract-basis. I’ll be doing user support, aka Happiness Engineer, with special focus on Japan.

Here’s my story in case you’re intereted.

I’ve been using WordPress for a while on my Japanese blog site. I had a Movable Type blog since May 2003, then switched to WordPress in November of the same year. Does anyone remember when the template was a single index.php file?

Many Japanese WordPress users had been using WordPress ME (Multilingual Edition), a fork project of WordPress. I was mostly helping out with documentation and other translation (which lead me to write WordPress books in Japanese).

Then in March 2008, the lead dev of ME (Otsukare-san) announced that he is quitting the development altogether, along with the documentation & distribution sites that he had been maintaining.

Around that time, I finally realized that WordPress isn’t something that just magiacally happens. It was our responsibily to keep it going. Had we showed more appreciation to Otsukare-san for doing what he was doing and offered more help, maybe things were diffrent. But the fact was that we were losing the main WordPress distribution site in Japanese at that time.

We launched the official Japanese WordPress site (ja.wordpress.org) soon after, then forums and documentation site. Yuriko even took the lead to set up a WordPress ME support site & forum for those who need help migrating to core WordPress install.

Since then, the localization team and the community have been very active working on WordCamps, WordBench (Miyoshi-san‘s brainchild). The plugin distribution project team was even interviewed as one of the most active projects on SourceForge.jp.

There is no doubt WordPress has played a big part in both my professional and personal growth.

So I had no other way but to say yes when Matt asked me (after this month’s WordCamp Tokyo) if I’d be interested in working with Automattic.

I think it’s a good news that they are putting more resource into places like Japan. I’m really excited to have this opportunity to help bring WordPress to more people.

WordCamp Tokyo 2009 Report

It’s been over a week after the event and I’m finally catching up to write on my blog!
I’ve written on ja.wordpress.org, WordCamp Japan blog and detlog.org (my Japanese blog) but I figured I still need to write here since there won’t be many reports in English.

WordCamp Tokyo 2009 took place on Sunday, April 12th at Kasai Kumin Kaikan in Edogawa-ku, Tokyo. We had reserved the venue because it was one of a few affordable choices we had for 100+ seats hall. Last year, all 80 tickets were sold out in a little more than 24 hours. We didn’t want that to happen again, so we picked a place where we didn’t have to worry about the same situation.

This year we had about 180 registrants; 150 attendees showed up (excluding about 20 staff + speakers). Although we didn’t fill the 450-seat room, we were very pleased with the growing interests. The length of the event was also extend to full-day from only having afternoon sessions last year.

The sessions consisted of 8 regular (10-30 minutes) speakers and 4 lightening talk (5 minutes) speakers. Matt Mullenweg came to Japan for the first time to speak. Michael Pick from Automattic, who spoke last year in Tokyo, talked about WordPress.tv. Other speakers’ topics included tips on plugin & theme development, dissection of Japanese language support plugin, Ktai (cell phone/mobile) blogging, and advantage of using WordPress in web dev businesses.

I thought it was interesting that there were so many questions submitted (we asked people to turn in written questions after the lunch break) for Matt’s Q & A time. We ended up adding some more time for him to answer questions on stage because of it. Some of the questions made me realize that we as a localization team need to be communicating better with Japanese users. That is, some things we take for granted are not necessariy well understood among other users. I hope to make an improvement on that through blogs and documentation in the future.

After-party was literally packed! Seemed like people had a lot of fun meeting old friends & new acquaintances. It’s a rare occasion for us Japanese localization team to get together all at once, so that was nice as well.

Now a week after the whole thing, WordBench.org (local WordPress fan community site using BuddyPress) added about 100 more users. I hope it’s an indication that people at WordCamp realized how fun it is to meet others in person to talk & learn about WordPress.

I want to thank everyone who came, spoke, and helped this WordCamp Tokyo. I also want to say thanks to all those who have been contributing to WordPress project; WordCamp will not exist without everyone who is making WordPress an awesome software.

Photo credit: odysseygate. You can find more WordCamp Tokyo 2009 photos on Flickr.