Job Thomas

As I mentioned in a previous post, Jon and I have been working on an easier way to understand transactional emails in WooCommerce. While we won’t get to the more proactive side of our little project during the Radical Speed Month at Automattic, two of our three pull requests focused on logging have already been merged and will be available in WooCommerce 10.9. Practically, our work means that…

Befor I started using AI, the discussions with my coaches often felt a bit disconnected from my work. Yes, I thought about our discussions, but making actual connections and implementing some of the feedback felt like a slow process and a heavy lift. I recently started using Claude for that, and it’s resulting in being able to approach things differently near instantly. I’m lucky to work with…

For a while now, my Wacom Intuos M will not respond when I unplug/replug the device or when my laptop goes into a sleep mode. I had discovered that opening Activity Monitor, finding all Wacom processes, and force quiting them fixed the problem. However, I assumed that Claude would be much better at troubleshooting it then I am, so I asked it for input. Claude shared this with me: Here’s what’s…

Zendesk launched a campaign to advertise its “self-improving AI agents.” The catchline is: “Want to talk to a human? Call your mom.” The opposite of “call your mom” is what we’re trying to build at Automattic. Not a support experience where you have to jump through hoops to chat to a human, but one where AI helps make the experience better. I wrote about this a year ago. Zendesk’s marketing…

In preparation of the work we’re doing for the Woo mail focus, I set up a local Woo environment using our Studio app. After that, I just turned to Claude Code for help. I shared the GitHub repo that Jonathan had created, and from there Claude installed the whole dev environment for me. Not only that, using the Linear MCP, I asked Claude to review the challenges we’re going to tackle and create…

Today, we’re starting an experiment at Automattic. Engineers, designers and product managers pair up and pick a challenge of their choice and try to fix it in one month. While I’m not an engineer, I paired up with my friend and colleague Jon Bossenger to address an issue that’s been bugging me for years: Woo mails often go to the spam folder. Lack of communication leads to fraud claims Case in…

Originally published as an internal post at Automattic. Altered for a wider public. What will jobs in support look like in six months from now? My hunch is that most people working in our industry have asked themselves this question several times in the past years. While the specifics are still in flux as AI is developing rapidly, I’m convinced that everyone in the support industry will need to…

For the fourth time in a decade, Belgium’s away shirt for a major tournament has been inspired by something typically Belgian. While some of the design choices over the past decade have been pretty horrible (I’m looking at you, Guy Fieri-inspired home jersey), these four have all been creative designs. Having not lived in Belgium for the entirety of that decade, I’ve also noticed that the…

Recently on my LinkedIn wall, a brand manager expressed his fascination that people could exercise wearing 3-4 different brands across their body. Where’s the brand loyalty in that? he wondered. I’ve recently run my second marathon, and at these distances, there is no brand loyalty unless you get sponsored. You wear what works best. My Kiprun shorts are the best ones I’ve tried. My podiatrist…

I’m not a developer, but I am an avid runner, and running gear is expensive. After checking the price of the same pair shoes for the millionth time, I thought: why not build an app to do that for me. So I opened Claude and started prompting. Within an hour, I had a working app running on my computer. It still makes mistakes, but that really isn’t the point here. The fun part isn’t the end…

Like last year, we spent the first night of our summer holidays in Oudtshoorn. This year, it coincided with our anniversary and we loved our stay at the Mooiplaas Guesthouse. Besides walking around a bit to look at the ostriches, we spent most of our time enjoying the refreshing pool in the scorching heat. Then we continued to Sedgefield for our first camping trip in a few years. The campsite…

When your CEO tells you to go visit a museum during work hours, you go visit a museum. And that’s exactly what happened this week at Automattic. Yesterday, I took my two kids (5yo and 2yo) to the National Gallery in Cape Town. While some of the art was a bit too mature for them — although they didn’t really notice — I used the same approach that Kim and I had started using over the years. Kim…

I have to reject people often, even within my team, and I try to do this in a way that is focused on growth. Feedback should be personal, actionable, and focused on the future. In a team with more than 100 people and different projects and focus areas, we occasionally have vacancies available. When that happens, I personally reply to every applicant, even those who were not selected. When I do…