I’ve had a black Happiness Engineer T-shirt hanging in my closet the past two years. The Editorial team at Automattic sent it to me in a thank you package for working on a project with them in early 2014, when I was a blogger using WordPress.com, before I even knew Automattic existed (Automattic is the maker of WordPress.com). I thought the T-shirt was so cool, but I didn’t feel right wearing it because I wasn’t actually a Happiness Engineer. I didn’t even know what a Happiness Engineer was. So I looked it up. I followed the breadcrumbs from the care package to Automattic’s Work With Us page.

And my life totally changed.

Here was a company dedicated to democratizing publishing. Here was the company that had made it easy for me to share my writing with the world, without having to go through the gatekeeper of a publishing house…