The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
📅 Finished on: 2026-03-22
They were visionaries at Automattic, but it was also truly chaotic.
Recommended in Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager for fully remote teams. Reviews say it is well written, especially the first part, and rich in stories and anecdotes. Take it with a grain of salt; it likely does not have much practical information; it is more a story about remote work.
Cute book; it must have felt like a dream to work there, and it seems more like an open community than a real company. I imagine they have many more processes today, but it is still nice to hear visionary accounts from companies that were truly remote, years and years ahead of their time. Nice story, a bit utopian, and written fairly well. Some points about how they communicated make me smile, but it was a different time.