Achievements Unlocked!

It’s been over a week I added a checklist for myself to work on my second application on becoming a Happiness Engineer at Automattic. So now I’m going to review my progress and share with you a few achievements that I obtained during this period.

Volunteer at WordPress.com Support Forum

This is still an on-going process, not going to end if my ultimate goal is to join Automattic. 🙂 As at 28th July 2018 10:25 AM (GMT + 8), I’ve made 230 replies on the forum since 13th July 2018. The figure might not be impressive but I learned a lot from those replies from some of the mistakes I made. I really appreciate the staff and moderator for pointing out my mistakes and share me the tips on how to handle the questions properly (even when I’m not their colleagues yet!).

Though most of the replies involving replying and customizing using my own pre-defined answers, some of them are quite challenging as I need to search for the articles on the WordPress.com documentation guides, I may need to perform testing on my test sites before I reply with my answers, and some I don’t even have the ability to reply and help with (such as account recovery).

I think I’m going to write a blog post on this experience soon.

Familiarize with features in WordPress.com

This is also an on-going item. To achieve this, I volunteered to create a site for my friend to promote her homemade handcrafted items. The site is still in private mode as there are a couple of things to be discussed and finalized before we publish to site to the public.

On top of that, I have a few sites for different purposes. One for me to practice and review the assignment that I failed in my first application, one serves as my test site for me to test out the issues faced by the members in the forum, and this site serving as my personal tracker on my progress to join Automattic.

Build e-commerce website using WooCommerce on self-hosted WordPress

Thanks to the free WordPress hosting on CloudAccess.net, I’m able to self-host my dummy WooCommerce site on it without paying a cent. So far there’s no progress on this yet but I plan to replicate the online bookstore that I built in 2014.

Brush up HTML and learn CSS on Udemy

I’ve purchased and started a web development course on Udemy and completed the first chapter on HTML, I’m moving on to the CSS chapter. There are a total of 15 projects included in the course and one of them is to create a site using WordPress. A free premium hosting is also included in the course for a year’s access so that the students are able to publish their projects.

Learn more on Customer Service

Apart from reading Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, I’ve started the learning path of Become a Customer Service Specialist on LinkedIn Learning (previously known as Lynda.com).

Currently on the first course – Customer Service Foundations (2014) by Jeff Toister, an author, consultant and trainer on customer service. Apart from being charming, his training videos give me a lot of ideas about customer service that I never think of previously.

Complete the Contact Form 7 Lesson Plan

This is not really a requirement in the job application but I volunteered to help out in the WordPress.org community, specifically in the Make WordPress Training Team. Gladly, I completed the drafting process of the lesson plan and submitted my first pull request on GitHub! The lesson plan will then be copyedited by another volunteer.

This is one of my major achievements in the month as this is my first time contributing to an online community. And I found out that by working on the lesson plans, I could learn more about WordPress and also the plugins/themes.

After completed the draft on Contact Form 7 lesson plan, I took up the task to draft on the topic of setting up an e-commerce website using WooCommerce. Hopefully, by working on this lesson plan, I’ll be able to be more familiar with the features of WooCommerce plugin.

Other Achievements

Apart from submitting my first pull request on GitHub, I have completed two courses on LinkedIn Learning! The courses are WordPress Ecommerce: WooCommerce and WordPress.com Essential Training. So after the course completion, I’m able to add them to my LinkedIn Profile.

Next target is to complete a few courses on customer service, WordPress Essential Training and also courses on CSS.