Interview - Matt Mickiewicz, COO of SitePoint.com

In the last interview, we got into Jeffrey Zeldman's pants, and now it's time for a little SitePoint "down under". So, I'm here with SitePoint's Co-Founder and Online Marketing Manager, Matt Mickiewicz.

SP: Matt, I have to ask, have you ever considered changing your name to something people can type? I've heard some odd names like Wiszniowski that I can both say and spell, but yours really does take the cake. Any plans? How about if we start a petition?

Ahh... yes, the famous last name. Did you know it's actually found in every encyclopedia? Adam Mickiewicz was the Polish equivalent of Shakespeare... they even have a statue of him in Krakow's Town Square. How many people can say that about their ancestors?

Seriously though, the name lends itself to some good jokes. I was doing a lecture in Quebec this one time, and afterwards I was talking to someone who had an equally obscure name. Needless to say, we both got asked to "spell that" all the time. Her standard reply? "Got half a day?"

Life @ SitePoint

SP: What is an average working day in the life of Matt like?

Since I work out of my home office, I tend to set my alarm clock for 9AM. While my email is downloading and being processed by MailWasher (and being checked against 5 separate blacklists) I can be found off in my kitchen making breakfast. I used to make pancakes about once a week, until a recent bad experience that ended up with my smoke detector going off, and staying on. After a few minutes of futile attempts to turn it off, and the realization that it wasn't battery powered, I just started yanking at the various elements... and got mildly electrocuted.

SP: How did you end up being involved in SitePoint? Were you part of the "Sausage Exodus" as they say?

Ahh... no. I dragged them out of Sausage! SitePoint.com used to be called Webmaster-Resources, which I registered on April 1st, 1998. It grew, and grew, and grew, and advertisers were literarily throwing money my way. At one point, I had a waiting list of advertisers. Eventually I found Mark Harbottle and Jason Donald over the Internet, and we formed a company. The rest, as they say, is history.

SP: You, Mark and Jason own SitePoint. How do you avoid problems in the partnership? If one partner spends less time at work than the others, how do you solve it? If one says yes, the other says no, what happens?

We discuss it. We've never had any major disagreements. By taking into account multiple viewpoints, we come up with ideas and strategies that no single one of us could have come up with individually. So 2+2=5.

SP: Do you take any time off from SP? Do you work regular hours or is it round-the-clock? What do you do with any spare time?

I used to be a workaholic, skipping vacations, working 'til 11PM at night and weekends. Over the past two years I've learned that what's important is not how long you work, but how much you accomplish while you're working. So working smarter, not harder, has been my guiding philosophy in recent years. While I still can be found on the computer 'til late at night on weekdays, on Fridays I sometimes take off early, and I almost never work on weekends anymore.

SP: What's in store for the future of SitePoint? I keep hearing about "SitePoint NextGen", what is that, and what can we expect? Give us the inside juice that nobody outside of the "office" is allowed to know about. We promise, we won't tell.

How about if I give you the answer in binary code? :-P

SP: What are you goals -- for SitePoint, and for yourself?

For SitePoint: to become a leader in the Web Development Publishing field, and a pioneer in developing new and more profitable publishing, marketing and sales systems for content. Just what we're doing, or how we're going to do it, will have to remain a trade secret though... let's just say that lots of good things are on the way.

I AM Canadian

SP: So just *how* superior do you feel to be living in this beautiful country we call Canada, as opposed to your co-workers who are on some island called Australia?

SitePoint knows where to live. Vancouver and Melbourne are ranked the #1 cities to live in, in the world.

Speaking from Vancouver's perspective: Whistler, the world's #1 rated ski and snowboarding resort is just a 3 hour drive from my house. The ocean is 45 minutes away. Parks and lakes are within 20 minutes of my house, and yet I only live 5 minutes from a shopping mall and all the major conveniences of life, including the liquor store...

SP: How does the time zone difference affect SitePoint work? Is it frustrating going to bed just as your team is getting into work, or does it mean you can give them lots of work and then literally "sleep on it"?

We schedule weekly phone meetings, but sometimes the time difference does get in the way. I frequently find ICQ messages sitting for me in the morning which were sent in early afternoon Australia time -- which was midnight here. I usually work late, so our working time does overlap by several hours Monday through Thursday, my time.