It’s been a month since my last update on my journey to become a Happiness Engineer at Automattic. I’ve achieved a lot in the month of August and I’m quite satisfied with my overall progress. So here comes my monthly recap on what’s been done to improve my skills required for the job.
Volunteering at WordPress.com Support Forum
Since 13th July 2018, I’ve posted over 1000 replies in the forum. By working on the topics in the forum greatly help me in gaining more knowledge on supporting WordPress.com. I’m more confident in answering questions related to domain and CSS now. And by observing the replies made by the Happiness Engineers, I discovered some useful tools like the Global DNS Propagation Checker and SecurityTrials.
Other useful tools I used when volunteering at the support forum are:
- Archive.org: useful when a user unable to recall the changes made to the site, especially to revert to the previous activated theme.
- WordPress Theme Detector: might not work 100% but at least it helps.
- Auto Text Expander for Google Chrome: a free alternative to TextExpander.
- TextExpander: highly recommended by Happiness Engineers to quickly send pre-defined answers.
In the month of September, I’ll be shifting my main focus out of the support in the forum and paying more attention to improving my skills and knowledge of CSS, DNS, and WordPress.
Learn CSS
CSS is one of the skills that I need to improve in order to get hired. So I spent a lot of time learning it from watching LinkedIn and Udemy courses as well as completing the hands-on exercises I can find.
What I’ve done so far for CSS:
- Completed LinkedIn CSS Essential Training 1 course.
- Started FreeCodeCamp Responsive Web Development Course and completed 2 projects out of 5.
- Learned how to use Chrome DevTools to inspect CSS elements and modify the layout by adding CSS. This helps me a lot in answering CSS topics in the WordPress.com support forum.
Next, I’m going to learn CSS better by applying the lessons I’ve learned into some practical exercises and small projects, mainly by completing the projects in the FreeCodeCamp and Udemy courses.
Make WordPress Training Team
I edited three more lesson plans and earned the Training Team badge on my WordPress.org profile in August. I can only work on the tasks for the Training Team during weekends so normally it took me 1 to 2 weeks to complete editing a lesson plan for instructional review and followed by the copy-editing.
One of the challenges is preparing slides the first time for one of the lesson plans using Shower. Thanks to the introductory video uploaded by one of our team leads, the slides are completed in a few hours.
Lesson plans edited in August 2018:
WordPress Kuala Lumpur Meetup
I’ve attended my first WordPress KL meetup on 18th August 2018 and I’m excited to learn about the news on WordCamp KL 2018!
Even though I don’t have the skills required to help out in design and networking but I do have a pair of hands in volunteering in some of the general tasks like liaising with the T-shirt printing vendors and setting up the event. I’m looking forward to attending the first meeting for the preparation of WordCamp KL 2018 this month.
