
How is WordPress.com made? - kingsidharth
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/how-is-wordpress-com-made/
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fourspace
One interesting thing about how Automattic works is that they don't hire
engineers without first going through a trial contract. Instead of the normal
interview process where they ask you arbitrary questions, you work on the
actual codebase solving real bugs.

This ultimately answers the questions of a) whether or not you can work with
PHP and the WordPress code, and b) whether or not you can work and collaborate
with the team remotely. If hired, you can then immediately start contributing
without much more ramp up time.

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skeltoac
This is true. After a person has received and accepted an offer for
employment, they work as a member of the Happiness (support) team for three
weeks before starting on their own job. When WordPress.com opened, everyone in
Automattic (Matt, Ryan, Donncha, myself) got a copy of every support request
in email. So the support tour is a part of a long tradition. It's also a good
way to learn the ropes according to those who have done it.

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skeltoac
I help make WordPress.com. Any questions?

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spudlyo
Can you talk a bit about how you scale it? I'm especially interested in if you
use a shared filesystem like NFS to keep the blogs.dir consistent across
multiple web front ends, or do you use something like fuse on top of mogilefs
or HDFS? Do you use varnish? Could you share your config?

Thanks a lot!

~~~
mgarfias
A good place to start would be Barry's blog: <http://barry.wordpress.com/>

Hes not updated it in quite awhile though.

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skeltoac
Barry has the strength of ten sysadmins.

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ck2
So out of curiosity, how many _actual_ people work on WordPress.com - Matt has
gone on a hiring-spree in the past year or two apparently:

<http://automattic.com/about/>

It used to be only a handful of people and I know the usage stats haven't
grown that much.

20 people for _all_ of Automattic in June 2008:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080624032336/http://automattic....](http://web.archive.org/web/20080624032336/http://automattic.com/about/)

Today there are like 50 people on that page, some of them are for Gravatar and
InstantDebate and PollDaddy, so what's the current headcount for wp.com ?

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skeltoac
Automattic has around 70 people working full time. I can't keep track. Not
everyone works on WordPress.com. Without referring to any records, I'd guess
we have a couple dozen on technical, a dozen on support, a handful on design,
and a handful on business.

