Other than the annual Grand Meetups, every team or subteam at Automattic is able to get together a few times a year to work on a project, and to solidify the the bonds between the team members. At the beginning of November, I went to San Juan, Puerto Rico, with the Jetpack Pit Crew (the developers, Tim, George, Miguel, Ben, Dave) and the Happiness Engineers that answer Jetpack support requests these days (me, Jeremy, Carolyn, Ryan, Karen and Deborah), and special guests Andrew, Nikolay and Konstantin. We worked on a couple of important projects: reworking some aspects of the modules page in everyone’s Jetpack installation, and a complete reworking of the Jetpack support pages to make it easier for people to find the information they need when they have a question about a Jetpack module.

But, no meetup is complete without some activities as well! We went to the warm-water beach every day, several times a day; it was a 30 second walk to it and it was hot and humid all week, so who can blame us! 🙂 We also explored Old San Juan a bit and El Morro, went for a walk in a mountain forest and a swim in the Charco Azul (which wasn’t so Azul that day; since it had rained on and off all week, the water was freezing and filled with sediment), and on our last day there, we went snorkeling around reefs from a catamaran! I’d never been snorkeling before, and without my glasses I couldn’t see much anyway, so I ditched the snorkel and wore my prescription swimming goggles (yes, those exist!), which made the day much more enjoyable. Of course, the open bar (rum punch!) on the catamaran helped quench my thirst after swimming in all that salt water. 😉

More pictures below!