I made a 2-minutes video when my team had a team meetup in Langkawi a couple of weeks ago (âLeviosaâ is the name of my team. Yes, that Leviosa.) This blog is the first one to see it đ
Some of the pics and the videos didnât sync as good as I want at the end of the video. Oh well. Better result next time âš
I was doing my usual mindless scrolling on Twitter when I saw KLa Projectâs tweet about their song âYogyakartaâ.
KLa Project is one of the seniors in Indonesia music industry. Their songs and albums holding legendary status among Indonesians.
One of their songs is âYogyakartaâ. Yogyakarta is a special district/area in Indonesia, and Indonesians usually associate Yogyakarta with âmemoriesâ; from fond memories to bittersweet ones. Apart from being a district, Yogyakarta is actually a city too, and the city is the topic of the song. Yogyakarta is special in many senses. It still upholds the traditions while the city keeps moving through urban development here and there. In its own ways, Yogyakarta holds mythical feelings of fleeting moments.
For Indonesiamatticians, this song is memorable. We sang this song one morning, one of those days during the companyâs latest Grand Meetup in Florida, back in 2019. There were only a handful of us at that time in Automattic. There were only five Indonesians, me included, in Automattic. We are a tight-knit group, thick as thieves. We promised to sing this song again when we meet on the next Grand Meetup â then, you know, pandemic and all that. Now, whenever one of us mentioned this song, it always replied with groans and some frustrated text, âDANGIT WHEN THIS PANDEMIC GONNA END.â
We were jetlagged, it was 5.30 AM in the morning, none of us had our coffee or tea yet, some even havenât slept since the night before, I woke up with barrage of messages on the Telegram group âOI! WAKE UP! WE ARE HAVING JAM SESSION!â and one of us, Eric, struck a chord followed by impromptu singing by Hafiz. Akeda and Ezra followed with guitar and bass.
For 4 minutes, âYogyakartaâ was heard in Florida, United States, sang by a bunch of sleep-deprived Indonesians. For 4 minutes, it became a memory.
Itâs your usual midnight blog post; when you got yourself stay awake in the middle of the night and social media is too weird (and too angry) for you to check.
I suddenly remember the times when I went to Florida, USA, for Automatticâs Grand Meetup back in 2019.
Specifically: Strawberries.
For me personally, it was one of the highlights.
We have strawberries here in Malaysia â we even have some locally grown.
The local ones are nice, but to have the good quality ones â I called it Driscollâs quality â is really hard and expensive. 250 grams (one medium pack) of Driscoll strawberries cost you 50 MYR (11 USD-ish). I rarely buy them, and when I did, I always hide it from my kids. The strawberries look like the ones you see on TV and magazines. Plump, round, and really sweet.
During GM 2019, we stayed in Hilton Orlando Lake Buena Vista â and I found out they have a minimarket inside the hotel (shoutout to fellow Automatticians for showing me around when I arrived at the hotel.)
I passed some shelves, looking for cup noodles, when my eyes saw the fridge area. There they were, stacked neatly, boxes and boxes of strawberries. Plump, round, and sweet strawberries.
I checked the price.
2 USD.
In Malaysian Ringgit, it would be 8 MYR.
It took every fibre on my being to not put out my arm up front and push all the boxes into my shopping basket.
I got two boxes, and I think I skipped on my way to my room, feeling happy.
Also, much to my delight, I noticed strawberries are part of daily breakfast menu during the GM. I always made sure I took some strawberries on my plate before I got myself pancakes or toasts with jam.
TIL Strawberries are not berries
⊠eggplants, tomatoes and avocados are botanically classified as berries. And the popular strawberry is not a berry at all.
â The Strawberry: A Multiple Fruit
Also, I have been eyeing this⊠Japanese strawberries. Super expensive. Mega expensive. Iâm so tempted to buy it, but goshdangit, does it worth it to fork out RM 100 (24 USD) for one pack? đ„Č
In Automattic, we usually have yearly announcements of new designs or products for our swag/merchandise. For 2021, the swag is a little bit special to me â mostly because I involved in one of the sticker series design.
Introducing: Lion Dance Wapuu.
This is actually a project that started as a joke. One of my teammates prepared her sabbatical leave that started during the Chinese New Year so we chatted about Chinese New Year celebrations and one of folks on the team channel mentioned, âWapuu in lion dance costume would be super cute.â
As soon as I heard the comment, I did a really fast and rough sketch. Wapuu is fairly easy to draw because it fits all my character preferences: Round and chonk. Also, I really like drawing lion dance costume. After what happened in 2020 (and still going on in 2021,) I felt it would be pretty neat to bring a little bit of cheer.
I shared it on one of the officeâs public Slack channel â Asiamatticians channel â and everyone shared really good responses. I was content at that time. I was pretty happy.
Then, my colleague from Marketing division mentioned me. âHey, I pinged you on the Eventsâ Slack channel. Seems like everyone like it very much and they want to make it a sticker.â
âAre you serious.â
âYES!â
I worked together with folks from my team, Events division, and Designs division. We chatted, joked, and shared insights on the origin of Chinese zodiac, the process of making the vector version of Wapuu, and the colors. It was a really awesome experience, to work cross-division like that. It wasnât a super major project, but it has been really motivating and refreshing encounter.
And now I have the stickers!
Aside from Wapuu Lion Dance, we also have Wapuu Year of the Ox! Check them out on Mercantile store!
Things usually pretty quiet on June – August because itâs summer break on most part of the world. I remember last year (2019), chat and e-mails were ghastly quiet, we even got chances to play tic-tac-toes on our Slack channel and some slapbot (a bot that you can send command to, uh, slap your colleague on the channel.)
Due to the pandemic, things look pretty constantly crowded. Folks staying at home and preferring to do things from one location to minimize risk starting to venture into website or blog building.
The latter was pretty âeasyâ (blogging.) You open a blogging service, including wordpress.com, create a blog, and voila, you have a blog.
The first one â building a website â not so. Even for seasoned veteran on website building, creating a website means you have to think about so many factors within the website. What kind of contents you want to have on the website? If itâs an online shop, what kind of products do you want to sell? What kind of color scheme that you want to use? Brand image? Should I blog too? How about SEO?
And speaking about SEO, even bloggers have the same questions â how do I build my online presence? Iâm blogging for my livelihood, how do I expand and monetize that?
And trust me, those questions are asked on daily basis â and no, quite the contrary of folks might think â those questions are not silly questions! Just yesterday, I had a user who wanted to know more about WordPress.com themes and how to improve their websiteâs theme. They even asked if we can recommend some design books for them to check about WordPress theme â itâs super sweet! We discussed about color palette, color scheme, and accessibility. I learned a lot from their questions, especially on being mindful in regards to website readability and navigation.
If your website is hosted in WordPress.com (or maybe even itâs hosted anywhere? It should be okay, though! The more the merrier,) you are invited to join WordPress.com Growth Summit, our first ever summit for bloggers, creators, and business owners. You can learn and join sessions with WordPress.com product experts (I SEE ZELDMAN ON THE LIST!) and you can even meet our Happiness Engineers (in case you are sick of me đ)
If you want to check more about WordPress.com Growth Summit, feel free to visit the website here: WordPress.com Growth Summit or read the teamâs blog post on The First-Ever WordPress.com Growth Summit Is Coming, and You Wonât Want to Miss It
Thatâs okay! WordPress.com also have free daily webinar â yes, DAILY. I donât know how my colleagues able to pull that off. DAILY. WEBINAR. DAILY. I have to drag my lazy bum just to blog once a week â that folks can join. The topic ranges from Quick Start on blogging to WooCommerce (can I have an amen from aspiring business owners?)
If you unable to join the webinar, you can still see the recordings on Automatticâs Youtube channel here.
To know more about the webinar, feel free to check it out on its website here: WordPress.com Webinar
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