Once a year, every employee of Automattic (the folks behind WordPress.com) get together in one place for a week. This time, we returned to Park City in Utah, which is home to the Sundance Film Festival. By this point, the company has grown to 400 people, based in locations all over the world; a number that is more than double that of the total when I first joined.

During the Grand Meetup, we spend the week collaborating on projects, eating together, drinking (a lot), teaching and learning new skills, making music, dancing, and generally getting to know more about the people that we spend a good chunk of our lives speaking to online.

It is a surreal, exhausting experience to be around that many colleagues for an entire 7 days, especially when everybody seems like a celebrity (to steal a friend’s phrase), and you know them better by their profile picture…