X-hacker

lore

web devops culture

Automattic's recruiting header on WordPress.com and its VIP-hosted sites: an invitation to apply, for whoever is reading the headers.

Responses from Automattic's platforms have carried an X-hacker header in several wordings over the years, the best known being an invitation to visit the company's jobs page and apply to join the fun, mentioning this header, and the shorter Want root? Visit join.a8c.com and mention this header. The logic is sound: a person inspecting response headers of a blog platform is a person the platform might want to hire, and mention this header makes the candidate's path traceable. Wikimedia's engineers noticed it on blog.wikimedia.org, which was hosted on WordPress VIP, and filed a ticket about it. The same company's page cache announces itself with a sillier header, x-nananana.

Also known as: X-Hacker, recruiting header, Automattic hiring header

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