My junior year of college, while I was Colorado skiing with Cory and some friends, Cory first brought up the idea of me coming to work for iThemes. At the time, iThemes was in need of someone to help respond to sales emails. I had a little bit of experience with WordPress (meaning I had broken a few sites, and begged Cory to help me fix them), and Cory thought I could help lighten the load of sales emails.

It only took a month or two of working at iThemes for me to realize that this was something I wanted to be part of for the long haul. At that time, the team was only about 5 people, so I was surrounded by incredible talent. Chris and Cory immediately started investing knowledge in me. Eventually, Cory confronted me with a question: “Matt, what do you want to do here?” To be honest, I wasn’t completely sure. I eventually figured out that I loved developing and solving problems, and decided I wanted to do theme development.

iThemes has an awesome culture of continued learning, but I also had to make a personal investment of my time to learn the skills to get the job I wanted. I used nights and weekends (and eventually dropped out of college, but don’t tell my mom) to soak up everything I could about web development. Then, I would utilize resources like Chris Jean during the day to help push me and show me what I needed to learn. I can say without a doubt that even if I had all the drive in the world, I could not have learned as much as I did as quickly if I hadn’t surrounded myself with the best and most talented developers and leaders.

Eventually, I started developing the front end of all of the themes we were releasing. I even released a free plugin or two. Our company continued to grow, and Cory started helping me shape some of my roles in that growth. One thing Cory challenged me with was helping to create and sustain a culture that made iThemes a great place to work. He cast a vision for the culture he wanted to work in, and charged me to help make it happen. As we grew even more, we knew we had to look for more space. Then, about a year ago, we moved in to our third office space (fourth if you count Cory’s house). Now we had 2,500 square feet of playground. It was a perfect space to cultivate our culture. It wasn’t much to look at when we first got it (and admittedly is always a work in progress), but we have tried to make a space that is more than just a place to plant your butt for 8-10 hours a day. We wanted a space that inspired creativity. I think we have made a great effort in that direction, and plan to continue making it better (as I type, there is literally a painter putting some new color on our dev room walls).

Now, our company has grown to 20 team members (with more coming all the time). Cory recognized that we were going to need to have some leadership in place so we could continue to mold the culture of our workplace. About a month ago, he gave each of our 4 brands a team lead to help direct the teams. Additionally, he started talking to me about a new chapter in my role here. We didn’t really know what it would be called, but we knew some of the things that needed to be done. After some planning, Cory came to me with the idea of COO. I had to look it up, because I wasn’t really sure what all that meant. After reading about it, and comparing it to the goals that we had set for my new role, we both thought it was a pretty good fit.

Honestly, I’m lucky to be here. I have no doubt that there are people out there that are smarter than me, but haven’t gotten the same opportunities that I have. I am grateful to Cory and his partners for taking a risk on me. When people ask Cory how he has been so successful at what he is doing, I always hear him respond with, “I was in the right place, at the right time, and I was ready.” I’ve decided to adopt that. It’s not that I was the best at the time, it is that I was at the right place. at the right time, and I was ready.

Last week, I had the chance to shoot (more) photos of Cory Miller, and I wanted to share a few of them with you.

Something really interesting happens to Cory when he is in front of the camera. It is almost like the lens turns him in to an uncontrollable being, and he just makes a lot of really weird faces. I’ll have to post more pictures to include a few of those, but for now, these will have to do.

I had to pull this one out of the gallery and show it full size below. It was just too pretty to only be on this page once…

-matt

The Standard Headshot

Pretty easy to explain. Just a plain old cropped in shot of shoulders and head. The face is clearly distinguishable, and I have the greatest chance of recognizing you in person if you use this type of photo.

The Full Body

The fully body shot on twitter is exactly what it sounds like. Head to toe. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure you have pretty feet. But you are overlooking a very important part of the Twitter profile pic: it is TINY. You get a roughly 50X50px area to show me who you are. At that size, your full body shot looks like a stick figure in the frame.

The Uncropped Shot

This one gets me every time. In case you didn’t notice, the image that shows up next to your name is square (you know, the shape with four equal sides). Yet, even with this very obvious fact, I still see people using images in their pictures that are not square. This results in a terrible crop that ends up showing me some random body part.

The Candid

This is actually one of my favorites. This is not a profile picture at all. Rather, this is an every-day image of you that you have cropped to use as a profile pic. When this is done right, it can be beautiful.

The Silhouette

The silhouette is an “artsy” shot of yourself in which you are completely unrecognizable. If you are really trendy, you probably even color shifted the images so your abstract-self is a different color.

The Buddy Shot

We get it: you love your wife. We love her too, but there just isn’t enough room in that tiny little picture for you to show everyone how much you care about her. To get back to the explanation, the Buddy Shot is the commonly seen shot of multiple people in the frame. Besides the rant I went on above, I see this used with a group of friends all the time. The problem is that it makes it hard to know which on of the people you are, especially if the people in the shot are the same gender.

The Cartoon

The cartoon is the profile pic that doesn’t have a picture of you at all. Instead, it has a cartoon image of something else. This type of profile pic can be humorous, especially if the image you choose has some resemblance to you and your personality. The only problem with this, much like some of the others, is that you are not recognizable in the real world by this image.

Now that we have covered the basic styles, here are a few DOs and DONTs -

DO – Crop tight. We want to see your face so we can connect with you.

DO – Think outside the box. Some of the best profile pics I see on twitter are the candid shots that are out of the box.

DONT – Take the picture with a bunch of your friends.

DONT – forget to crop your image to a square.

DO – Follow me on twitter, here.

-matt

Heading down with me are three other members of the iThemes/WebDesign.com team: Cory Miller, James Dalman, and adBrad Ulrich.

I know that there are a million things going on at once during the 5-day Interactive Conference, so I decided to make a list of a few “must-see” speakers while I am in Austin.

• REWORK by 37signals – Jason Fried is going to be talking about the new book, and I definitely want to hear about it. Maybe I will even get to meet him for a bit.
• CSS3 Design with HTML5 – We are constantly trying to push and use the latest tools for web design, and I am hoping this session will help me move deeper in to CSS3 especially.
• Is WordPress Killing Web Design? – I think it is obvious why I want to see this one. It is going to get controversial I am sure. I hope it gets good.
• Gmail: Behind the Scenes – 5 of the folks from Google will be there talking about one of my favorite pieces of software I use all day.
• WIRED Happy Hour – Wait, how did that get on there? hmmmmmm

There are TONS more sessions that I hope to be a part of, but I don’t want to let my list get too long where I will be stuck in a schedule. With so much going on and so many people to connect with, I want to have a flexible schedule while I am down there.

Me and Brad are planning on blogging some while we are down there. If you are interested, check us out at sxsw.ithemes.com.

Here is the story:

I, like the brilliant guy that I am, dropped my iPhone headphones on the ground and rolled over one of the earbuds with my rolly-chair.  This happened a few weeks ago, but I decided last week I wanted to replace them before I went to Atlanta.  So the night before my flight, I went to Best Buy and bought myself a set of $40 Apple headphones for the iPhone.  I get home and open the box, and out falls a GROSS pair of USED IPOD headphones.  I checked the box again, and not only did it not say iPod, it didn’t say used either.  According to the box, I should have received a NEW pair of IPHONE headphones.  You can imagine my frustration.I really wish I had taken a picture of how gross this headset was.  Seriously… dingy.  Jump forward to tonight.  I pack the headset up and head for Best Buy, receipt in hand.  To be honest, I thought I was going to have to rip someone apart.  What I got when I arrived at the store was a pleasant surprise.

I walked up to the Customer Service desk, and the guy asked what the problem was.  I calmly began telling him the story, and as soon as I removed the headphones from the box, he stopped me and said, “Gross.”  He proceeded to go and get me a brand new set of the NEW iPhone headphones (the ones with the volume controller built into the headphones) and said he wouldn’t even charge me the difference.  He said it was the least he could do after they sold me that disgusting set before.

I was shocked.  It was really incredible customer service.  I actually got more than I wanted when I walked through the doors.  I guess I am just writing all of this because I appreciate good customer service.  I try to do my best to be like the guy tonight, and make fans.  Some customers make it very hard, and it is impossible to make a fan out of everyone. But this guy saw the opportunity, and he jumped on it.  It worked too.  I am a fan.  And now I am blogging about it to spread the word.

Nice going Dave. (I think that was his name)

-matt