On August, 24th, 2009, I posted the following on this very site:

Today is the most beautiful of days. I’m not talking about the weather, but about a feeling that is currently impregnating every single fiber of my professional being. See, today marks the beginning of my trial phase (contractor) as Automattic‘s newest full-time systems wrangler.

I became employee #40-something (of now 259) as of September 21st that year, and in that span, I was part of the following teams (listing employees still with us today):

• Systems, with Barry, Demitrious & Pyry.
• Short stint as the “special projects” guy, before we started being big enough to have teams.
• NUX (WordPress.com signup, new users experience, domains, etc), with Nikolay.
• Janitorial (internal tools), with Andy, Matt, MT, Nick & Rose.
• Triton (WordPress.com UX), with Andy (again), Bob, Greg & Payton.
• Team I/O (APIs & partnerships), with Kat, Kelly, Joey & Justin.
• DotOrg (WordPress core development), with Alex, Andrea, Andrew, Cami, Ian, Jen, Jerry, Konstantin, Mark & Ryan.

There is nothing I would change about the last 5 years. I’ve met incredible people, worked on amazing projects, traveled to fabulous locations, all while trying to democratize publishing, change the way people work, and be the best dad/person I can be.

So thanks to my Automattic family, and here’s to five more years. :)