Best Practices

Nhi Vo

Fewer clicks, 18% more sites: redesigning the WordPress.com free‑site bar

We expected a redesigned WordPress.com free-site bar to get more clicks. It lost a quarter of them and still brought in 18% more new sites. Here’s where the gain came from, and how a day-3 health check caught a logging bug.
Fırat Gelbal

From Default to Delightful: AI-Assisted Data Visualization

I can never remember the exact syntax for visualization libraries. AI changes this. Now I describe what I want in natural language, iterate in conversation, and let the model handle the boilerplate. Five prompts transformed default charts into a visual story of WordPress’s 20-year evolution.
Yanir Seroussi

ExPlat’s Development Principles and Practices

When we started working on Automattic’s new experimentation platform (ExPlat), it became clear that we needed to agree on the development practices for the project. Achieving consensus was critical, given Automattic’s fractal nature and its strong emphasis on autonomy. In practice, these attributes lead to a high variability of project development cultures across the company, depending…
Igor Khrol

SQL — a Common Language for the Whole Data Team

Today, I wanted to share how we’ve empowered colleagues outside the data engineering team to write their own data transformations by overcoming coding language barriers. Within our Data team, there are several specializations: Data Analysts create dashboards and analyze data for business leads and product teams across the company. Data Scientists apply machine learning technology at…
Vicki Boykis

Teaching Python to Beginners

Vicki Boykis shares some tips on how to teach beginners to code.