Happy 20-year work anniversary to Donncha — the very first person to join the company, even before Matt! His post brings back the early days and shows the small group of people who started it all. They all look so young! It’s amazing to look back and see how far we’ve come. Here’s to the next 20!
I remember joining in 2011, and blaming the already 6-years-old codebase to always find Donncha’s username in the oldest corners of the code.
Photo by Mark Ralev. Thanks to Mark, I have some photos of myself from 2011.
This was the computer I used when I joined Automattic. I did my trial with it and bought a new one for my first team meetup.
And 3 of the only 4-5 photos I still have from the said meetup in 2011. The last photo features Matt and I think Stephane Daury but with the photo quality of my 2011 camera, it could also be Jason Statham.
Veselin.blog 
I wish you could give us a post on Atomattic and your role in WordPress. WordPress, its founding and life today, remain a mystery to me. Thanks for your consideration.
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Well, Automattic’s role for WordPress is essential because it provides funding, support, maintenance, and engineering for the new development to the open source project. Given that WordPress is open source, this support is also provided by other people and companies but Automattic has a leading role.
If you ask about myself, I’m an engineer on WordPress.com but this blog is personal and I very rarely talk about work. I post cat photos and stuff 🙂
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You could always say it was Jason Statham 😀.
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I’m so jealous of you that you get to work for this company. Sadly there are no suitable roles for me to apply for.
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I hope you find your path. The journey of self-improvement can be non-linear.
Looking back, the difficult choices for me up to this moment were in the area of “what do I want to study next”, “how do I study that thing”, “when do I find time and energy” and so on.
However, the job market these days is tough and perhaps this is the hard question now – Where rather than What. Not sure.
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I hope so too. I thought I had found something for the future but it turned out that it was not the right thing for me, but something really funny and creative might still be the case. I just hope I will land a new and better job soon.
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