Daniel Danilov

This post is the second of a series of posts describing what we do on a daily basis. If you’re interested in reading more you can follow the tag #a8cday. Here’s my day as a Happiness Engineer.

When I applied for the job of a Happiness Engineer, besides falling in love with the title right away, I didn’t really know what I was expected to do. After the last few weeks (mostly during my trial, and about a week of full time employment), I realized that this title is so wide in what it encompasses, that it’s difficult to sum up. To help people who might want to work with us, Automattic employees will be casting their day’s of work in their personal blogs, under the tag #a8cday – you’re welcome to read up about it!

Generally speaking, Happiness Engineers help out in many ways, including writing Daily Post and Hot off the Press articles, speak at WordCamps, write up the support docs, answer questions in the public forums and private forums posts, as well as private Live Chat support. I’m assigned to the latter, and therefore most of my day involves around answering chats and helping WordPress.com users with whatever they need.

Tuesday

Today started quite differently. I had to meet with a friend in the morning, although I overslept a bit and woke up at 08:40 instead. So, heading out to the center of Tel Aviv with my friend, I only came back home around 14:30. I was starving by then – so I spent a whole hour eating, starting from main dish, to dessert, to an extremely large and delicious coffee cup.

15:30 – Logged onto Slack / Olark. Started doing chats and catching up on updates with the team.

17:00 – Completed another round of P2 reading. I got quite tired here, since I was busy in the morning, so I took a little break from taking chats.

18:00 – Learned up about Theme Troubleshooting in one of our Happiness Engineering training P2 – which included a video guide from other more skilled HE’s about how to troubleshoot issues that may or may not be theme-related. Learned about OpenGrok, theme overlay, and a few other things. Pretty neat!

19:30 – Logged back on chat, time to catch up on those tickets and chats. Did that for a couple of hours non-stop.

22:00 – I can feel the tiredness sinking in, which is also why I’m writing this post on a Wednesday. I’m still doing chats, checking any unanswered tickets and following up on a loading bug report I made on Monday. I’m also having a mini-dinner while doing that.

23:00 – I close everything, go over my chats and emails, making sure I didn’t miss anything.

Today’s chats and tickets didn’t include anything out of the ordinary, mostly around domains, refunds, CSS help, lots of Widget-relate questions, and quite a few confused users about WordPress.com and WordPress.org. I’m still a little confused myself, as well.

The most interesting part of today was when I was reading all the #a8cday posts of all the other Automatticians. It’s quite fascinating, and everyone’s day is just so different. Tonight, that was my bed-time story(ies).