Automattic Data

Ideas and Insights from the Data Team at Automattic

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Move Fast and Don't Break Things: Shipping the Simplenote MCP

Move Fast and Don't Break Things: Shipping the Simplenote MCP

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From Messages to Episodes: Building Better Recall for AI Support

Our customers do not think of support as isolated chats. They think in terms of things they are trying to get done: connecting a domain, changing the look of a site, launching a store, fixing checkout, recovering access, or understanding a bill. That creates a challenge for an AI support assistant. If a customer returns and says: Let’s continue transferring my domain Then the assistant needs…

From Messages to Episodes: Building Better Recall for AI Support

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Bringing Metadata to Life at Automattic with OpenMetadata

The metadata problem at scale Automattic’s data ecosystem is large and highly interconnected: thousands of Iceberg tables and views queried via Trino, thousands of Airflow tasks producing and updating them via Spark jobs, and a growing catalogue of Looker and Superset dashboards and charts on top.  Most of the information about these assets exists somewhere, scattered across version control…

Bringing Metadata to Life at Automattic with OpenMetadata

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The WooCommerce Plugin Playbook: What Successful Stores Install, and When

Most plugin advice online is opinion‑dressed‑as‑fact: a list of “top 10 must‑have WooCommerce plugins,” usually written by someone selling one of them.  We looked at hundreds of WooCommerce merchants who started a store in the past 12 months, and found a clear four‑phase pattern. At the same four points in their growth, stores reach for predictable plugin categories. If you’re building a store,…

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From Default to Delightful: AI-Assisted Data Visualization

Default: Delightful: The same data. The same library. Five prompts and a couple of visualization principles transformed one into the other. I can never remember the exact syntax for Plotly. Or Matplotlib. Or any other visualization library. That used to mean choosing between two poor options: wrestle with documentation, or settle for drag‑and‑drop tools that can’t do what I actually want. AI…

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AI-powered Typo Hunting: Trust Your Docs, Readers Will

Our documentation has a trust problem, and I just found 142 reasons why. It started with a silly typo I noticed on one of the pages – something like “cotnact” instead of “contact”.  It was quick to fix, but it got me thinking: are there more?Third‑party writing assistants are available as browser extensions, and we also have a spelling mistake checker available within Jetpack. With such tools,…

AI-powered Typo Hunting: Trust Your Docs, Readers Will

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Organizing data.blog content via NLP and LLM

When redesigning data.blog, our primary goal was to make it easier for readers to find great content. One of the ways readers do this, is using the site taxonomy – the categories and tags that are used to organize the blog posts on the site. As data.blog grew over the past 8 years, we accumulated an excessive number of categories and tags. To address this issue and enhance content…

Organizing data.blog content via NLP and LLM

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New data.blog is here: Designed for Discovery

I’m excited to announce that the new data.blog is now live! This is the first visual/UX/logo/color refresh since the original site was built 10 years ago. Why the Redesign? Our original data.blog was like a brilliant but cluttered data scientist’s desk. Valuable insights were everywhere, but it was not always easy to find what you needed. After analyzing our metrics and discussing usage…

New data.blog is here: Designed for Discovery

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Data Talks & Conferences Recommended by Automatticians

This post highlights specific data conferences and talks recently recommended by Automatticians (employees at Automattic).  Staying informed is key in the fast-evolving field of data science. At Automattic, we value continuous learning and regularly attend conferences and talks that advance our understanding and skills.  This post shares a curated list of events and talks that have particularly…

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What your neurodivergent colleagues wish you knew

Neurodivergent people (including autistic people, and those with ADHD, dyspraxia and so on) have a brain type that diverges significantly from what’s generally considered the norm (‘neurotypical’). The neurodiversity movement aims to value that diversity and embrace difference. In 2023, we asked members of Automattic’s neurodiversity ERG, ‘Neurodiverseomattic’, the question “What’s one thing you…

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From Support to Data Science and Analytics: My Journey at Automattic

“Is it possible to transform a role in customer support into a data science career?”  This question, which once seemed like a distant dream, became my career blueprint at Automattic. My journey from a Happiness Engineer in September 2014 to a data wrangler today is a tale of continuous evolution, learning, and adaptation. Starting in the dynamic world of customer support with team “Hermes” (an…

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Hack Project: Support Feedback Firehose

Automattic is a globally distributed company and a few times each year, we come together for a meetup to align on team strategy and to forge stronger relationships. During these meetups, we tend to work together on various projects, sometimes called “hack projects.” These projects bring together people from various backgrounds and divisions to solve a certain problem. This year, I worked with a…

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Hack Project: Tackling FOMO on the P2 Land

As a fully distributed company, Automattic has always adopted a unique, mostly asynchronous way of communication. Among our most widely used communication tools, P2 is a WordPress plugin and a platform for teams to discuss ideas, share project reports, and collaborate transparently. You can basically think of it as Automattic’s internal blogging network, where people can both consume and create…

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Optimizing Connections at Meetups

Explore the journey of how Automattic leverages the power of optimization and genetic algorithms to transform our meetups into more engaging and meaningful experiences.

Meetups at Automattic Automattic has been a globally distributed company from the start. A few times each year, we come together for a meetup to align on team strategy and to forge stronger relationships. We’ve found that organized dinner groups are a great way to facilitate connections and meet new people from various teams. Creating meetup dinner groups turned out to be an interesting…

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Synchronizing Data with Apache Superset: Our Internal Solution

It is well known that, at Automattic, we love free and open source software. In fact, we have Automatticians actively contributing to a multitude of open source projects, with the main one being of course: WordPress. That’s why, as soon as we verified that the current versions of Apache Superset are robust enough to satisfy many of our data visualization needs, we proceeded to install an instance…

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The New Face of Jetpack Stats

Jetpack Stats is one of Automattic's most popular offerings, providing analytics for over 14 million users. In September 2022, we kicked off a project to modernize Jetpack Stats.

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Quest for Efficient AI: An Evaluation of the Vector Database Landscape

Earlier this year, due to soaring interest and multiple product initiatives, we went on a quest to evaluate and deploy an internally hosted vector database. We’re in the midst of the AI revolution, and many new AI-inspired product initiatives rely on vector embeddings. Embeddings are generated by AI models, and take the form of high dimensional vectors of features that represent the data in a…

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